Lights, Camera, Action
By Tamara Smallhorn
If there’s one must-see fixture in Sydney’s cultural calendar, it would arguably be the Sydney Film Festival, which opened this week.
And with a program that boasts 157 films from 47 different countries – including 92 Australian premieres and seven world premieres – it’s hardly surprising Festival director, Clare Stewart, is feeling upbeat.
“It’s an incredibly exciting festival. It’s like the coming together of various initiatives over the past four years,” Stewart says.
Stewart, who was appointed the Festival’s director in 2006 on the back of an impressive film programming career in Melbourne, says she is feeling more than settled in the Director’s chair.
“The move to take on the Festival was a move to Sydney – and four years in, I’m feeling very much the Sydneysider,” Stewart says.
“I have always been a huge fan of this city, and now that I’m a local, I feel very much at home with that combination of earthiness and glamour that Sydney has.”
Prior to coming on board with the Sydney Film Festival in 2006, Stewart spent 15 years working in film programming in Melbourne, including heading up the film program at the Australian Centre for Moving Pictures, and working at the Australian Film Institute and Melbourne Cinematheque.
Her exuberance for film is palpable as she describes some of the highlights of this year’s line-up.
“The Thai film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film festival and we will actually have the first screening since the film’s win,” Stewart says.
The Australian content also promises to please.
“I get really excited by Australian films. The Australian content for the past three years has been very strong, and the range this year is really diverse.”
Headlining the festival is Shirley Barrett’s much anticipated South Solitary, featuring dynamite father and daughter team Barry and Miranda Otto.
The Tree, an Australian-French co-production directed by Julie Bertucelli, comes direct to Sydney following its screening at the Cannes Film Festival. And Stewart, it seems, can hardly contain her excitement.
“I think every film festival hopes for something like this. It’s this amazing, knock-out film that’s just come from nowhere,” she says.
As far as programming – undoubtedly Stewart’s strong suit – the structure of the Festival program promises to have a ‘more defined texture’ this year, Stewart says.
One relatively new concept, called ‘pathways’, offers Sydneysiders a user-friendly guide to selecting which films to see, categorising films under the titles Make me Laugh, Fire me up, Love me, Take me on a journey, Freak Me out, and Push me to the edge.
“Rather than the traditional categories, this year we’ve really strengthened that to give a more defined texture to the Festival program. It makes it more accessible too,” Stewart says.
Among other highlights on offer for Sydney film enthusiasts are Sounds on Screens – a venture specially aimed at music lovers including live bands at screenings; Vampire Retrospective – a collection of old Vampire movies, in the wake of the success of franchises like Twilight and True Blood; and Queer Films.
Growing up in the small south Gippsland town of Korumburra in Victoria, Stewart recalls she had very little exposure to anything cinema-related in the town of 2,800, with the one somewhat startling exception of having once been a film extra.
She played a 10-year old school girl in Richard Lowenstein AFI-nominated film Strikebound, a movie based on a book about the first coal-miners’ strikes in Australia in the 1930s, and shot in an historic park in Korumburra.
“I hold Richard Lowenstein personally responsible for the worst hair cut I ever had – he gave us all bowl cuts and they were horrible,” Stewart reminisces.
On a more reflective note, she recalls the experience gave her a good impression of shooting ratios.
“I was there for two days and there was only about two seconds that made it to the film.”
The Sydney Film Festival runs to 14 June. Full program details can be viewed at www.sff.org.au.
