Phew!
June 18th 2003 -
Phew!
It has been a rather busy time as of late, and I have had very few moments when not either actually working or collapsing into bed. Of the moments in which I was doing neither of these, the most interesting as of late has been…
The RiverLife Film Festival
It was particularly exciting finding out that we had made the finals of the RiverLife film festival. On the day of the festival itself – almost two weeks ago now – I was running rather late. It was due to start at 6:30pm, and I only set off from work at 5:00pm in Sydney traffic. Anna called at about 5:15 wandering where I was, at which point I realised I had been confused and thought that we’d agreed that I should leave work at 5:00pm, rather than arriving home at 5:00pm. Not to mention, the festival started at 6:15, not 6:30. No matter, no matter. Anna caught a taxi to Newtown, while I hooned my way as much as I could through the traffic, to arrive at pretty much 6:15 on the dot.
I rushed into the cinema and straight into an interview with a reporter armed with a minidisc recorder. Wow! My first interview as a film-maker. I babbled on for a wee while, while casting about for the others, and eventually spotted Anna & Anna & Khaleigh. Then Paul and Greta arrived and we all stood in the queue chatting as the reporter went around interviewing other suspicious types. Photographs! Official photographs! Oh, the *glamour*!
We were eventually summoned into the cinema – a fairly good-sized one – and subjected to the usual introductory talks. High standard of the film-making, etc. Introduction to the judges. Then, a nasty cunning little trick: the judges had already decided the top three films of the fifteen finalists, and those three would be shown last.
The cinema went dark. Immediately, every one of us in the theatre – I presume most of us were film-makers and friends – started glaring at the screen to curse away our own films. The first film titles started: groans from one section of the audience. And I started realising that our film might be in trouble – the first film started very well indeed, with camerawork and shot choice clearly very professional, excellent music, decent acting, a fairly good theme. Then, about four minutes in, the theatre started to notice that the film was still going. Mentally, I was crying out for the editor to be shot. All that lovely footage, in the service of absolute tedium… no wonder it wasn’t in the top three. And despite the excellent start, I started feeling as if we had a chance again. What a cruel way of showing the films! Imagine how it’d be for the twelfth finalist!
Second film. Notourfilmnotourfilmnot… our film. Oh well. Paul and I had been rather nervous up to that point, but we could relax now, except for the fact that, in a very real sense, our film was taking the piss out of a number of the competition. In the meeting the week before I had noticed a prevailing attitude of “rub their noses in it” (the subject of the competition was “Pollution in the Cooks River”) and we decided to mock the attitude while trying to put forward a more… egad… positive message.
Anyway, the audience seemed to enjoy our film. They laughed at our laugh points. We were happy. We settled down to watch the rest of the competition.
I won’t go through all the films individually, because a lot of them were quite similar – documentaries talking to various people by the river, focussing on how ghastly it was *because of what we were doing, aren’t we bad*. There were some pretty interesting ones in the mix, but that was the prevailing theme, and it was rather embarassing because we had rather carefully taken the piss out of that attitude and our film was before all of theirs.
There was one film that I’m pretty sure was rather closely inspired by the classic short film “The Kitchen Sink”, a couple of surreal snapshot edit jobs, a CGI effort – and surprisingly, very little fiction. Anna & Anna & Khaleigh were beside themselves, because their film hadn’t come up for the whole first eleven films… and there it was, the twelfth. A rather sweet, bouncy, positive little film featuring lots of cardboard signs. Claire, my little sister, had written it based on the same concepts that we were using, partially based on the behavioural therapy theories of our Pa (to wit: keep it positive).
Anyway, we were rather hoping that the final three films would be better than the others, and such was the case: the first two, especially, were superb. One, the tale of a pair of mudcrabs who steal a model police car, exceptional for its insistant digressions into Crab TV programs – versions of the news, Big Brother, and so on. The one that eventually won was a tale of stereotypical Lebanese bullshitters, and their secret hobbies of being nice guys who are rather protective of the river. Nice. One thing I noticed especially about the winners was that they were all positive films (the vast majority of us losers were negative) and that three out of four of them had strong fictional elements – two of the top three, and the audience choice film.
We headed to the release party (which had very nice sushi) and stood around and talked for a while. It was odd. I was fairly prominantly in our short film, and was dressed similarly to how I was dressed in the film, so I was fairly easy to recognise. People came up and said Hello a lot, and even when they didn’t say Hello, I still saw the looks of recognition. Not used to that, but I’m sure I could *become* used to it… ah, celebrity! One of the judges was Christine Olsen, writer of the screenplay for Rabbit-Proof fence, and I overcame my natural shyness to ask her what she thought – and was delighted when she gave some actual criticism! She had felt that the themes of the film needed to be expanded and explored further, and that the end was a little weak compared with some of the previous segments. Excellent! I thought that her views were insightful and the fact that she had been paying attention and had such specific criticisms felt like more of a complement than any of the “It was good”s. Or else I’m in denial. Either way, I came out feeling pretty great.