THE NAKED CITY: HOORAY FOR BONDIWOOD!
Image: GOING DOWN. Image: film still
When filmmaker Haydn Keenan decided to screen his low budget movie, Going Down, in Melbourne after a highly successful sixteen week season in Sydney, he found a little cinema in the heart of the city that agreed to take it on. Unfortunately he failed to realise that the venue had been a popular grindhouse for porn flicks right up until the day before. As he recalls:
“Well that’s okay, but when you open your film the next day and it’s called Going Down there is the potential for some real problems. The raincoat brigade, to a man, demanded their money back! Anyone who paid to go in walked out in the first fifteen minutes. For the whole week I think we grossed about $30.”
Flash forward some forty years and a 4K restoration of Going Down will soon take its place in Bondiwood, a unique festival of iconic Australian features and documentaries, all made or starring somebody living in Bondi. A long time Bondi resident himself, Haydn sees the festival as a reassertion of the suburb as a centre of creativity and bohemia in the ‘70s and ‘80s, long before the onslaught of gentrification and soaring real estate prices.
He admits that the concept began almost as a joke, sitting around the table one night.
“We were talking about casting and crewing a film just from people who live in Bondi. It didn’t take long to pull together a full team of high quality people for our imaginary production. Talk turned to all the work these people had turned out, and as we spoke, the number of feature films, documentaries, hours of TV, music videos and shorts began to pile up. It was quite extraordinary. The output of this little bay has been quite phenomenal.”
Haydn certainly has a point here and it’s hard to think of any Sydney suburb that has produced such a mass of entertainment for Australia and the rest of the world. As he proudly proclaims:
“From Oscar nominees, to Cannes entries, international box office smashes, music videos seen millions of times, and multi award winning features – it’s been a treasure trove of material. It may sound like hyperbole but Bondi is the entertainment capital of Australia. Move over Hollywood we’ve got Bondiwood.”
This October, the wonderfully refurbished theatre in the Bondi Pavilion will play host to movies such as Wrong Side Of The Road, Swinging Safari, Babe, Pandemonium, The Castle, and Starstruck, to list just a few, as well as docos and shorts. There will be Q&As after each session with the filmmakers and stars, and even meat trays as door prizes in keeping with the festival’s egalitarian theme.
The fest will also feature two world premieres: Chris Hilton’s Citizens At War, about the turmoil in Ukraine, and Peter Gailey’s Bellingen The Promised Land, a warts and all look at the Aquarius generation and their struggles with an older Australia. If you never got into film school or have the urge to make your own little doco, there’s even a workshop with Ben Ulm from ITV who coached the contestants on the smash SBS show, Alone, on making a movie on their own.
It would be remiss, of course, to stage such a festival in Australia’s best known beach location without some images of the suburb itself or references to the ocean. In Pandemonium, a dingo girl is washed up on Bondi Beach and the film is set in the old Bondi Pav, whilst Going Down also features a number of scenes shot outside the Pavilion, on the beach itself and in the old Astra Hotel, a popular haunt of touring rock bands in the 1980s.
The surfing theme is well catered for with Alby Falzon’s Morning Of The Earth, often hailed as the greatest surf film of all time. There is also a rare screening of the now cult classic, Bait, a movie which grossed more than $100 million in China, and which The Times of London rated as one of the top ten shark movies of all time, with a shark running riot in a Coles supermarket!
A real community event, with numerous filmmakers, actors and volunteers all rallying together, Bondiwood is a celebration not to be missed, a film festival with something for everybody – and you don’t have to live in Bondi to attend.
October 5 — 8
Check out the full program at: www.bondiwood.au
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