New Acton is just about the best place to chill in Canberra (in my humble opinion) and Palace Electric Cinemas is the fridge light of that chill. A quality cinema anytime it is THE place to be in the next few weeks. Because …

It is the only cinema screening Galore, a film made in Canberra, about Canberra (or more exactly, Tuggeranong) teens during the 2003 firestorm. Which is getting a lot of buzz. My friend Michelle saw it last night and I am dying to hear her thoughts on it.

It is still screening Grand Budapest Hotel, one of the most entertaining films I’ve seen this year. If there were not so many other great movies to see, I’d just go back and watch this again and again.

It is screening The Rover, a harsh Australian film by the maker of Animal Kingdom starring Guy Pierce and Robert Pattinson – sure to banish the shadow of Edward forever. Greater Union and Palace are the only places you can see this film in Canberra.

And very soon it will be hosting the Scandinavian Film Festival. I saw a preview of Monica’s Waltz last night and if this accomplished movie is typical of what is to come, we are really in for a treat.

This film follows the warts-and-all life of Swedish jazz singer Monica Zetterlund and when I saw it I knew nothing about her. I have now come home and watched her perform on youtube, read about her on wikipedia and fallen just a little bit in love with the actress who played her – Edda Magnason – who is the ultimate ‘hyphenated talent’: she is a Swedish-Icelandic, singer-songwriter-actor. Yes, really.

Her voice is gorgeous, she does all her own singing, and hearing the Swedish language versions of some 1960s jazz standards is both odd and enjoyable. I could not believe this is her first feature length role.

The film follows the conventions of bio-films in getting the look and feel of both the subject and her era just right – I am in awe of the costume designer Kicki Ilander – but digresses from that convention with the action taking place in a sort of dream Sweden of the 1960s, where the seasons seem to reflect where her career is rather than a year passing. The action happens seemingly all at once and not, as it actually did, over many years. This may sound odd but it works, it unchains the story from having to link to a calendar of events (except for her disastrous entry into Eurovision) and allows the emotion of her story, rather than the facts, to take centre stage.

Therefore it highlights her career decisions, her fraught relationship with her father, her careless mothering of her daughter and her casually callous use of friends and supporters as parts of a whole and not media sound bites. It allows these facets of her story to develop without the fraught melodrama common to this type of film in the USA and allows filmgoers to feel as though they are entering her world. It does not judge, it just shares her with us, and I’m glad they did.

I am also looking forward to some of the other entries in the festival – particularly The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (Sweden). Not just for the title, although it is a corker, but for what promises to be a quirky, enjoyable story.

Metalhead (Iceland) looks like it might break your heart and The Keeper of Lost Causes (Denmark) will keep you on the edge of your seat.

But back to those gorgeous 1960s fashions in Monica’s Waltz.

If this is an era you love, if vintage fashion is your thing, here is just one more reason to get a little Electric cool – a French film about their greatest designer (again, my humble opinion) Yves Saint Laurent starts tomorrow. I don’t know how the story is going to be handled but it has the full backing of the designer’s Foundation and full access to his actual houses so… Apart from anything else, with the story starting in 1953, the range of fashion will be to die for!