Filed under: PUBLISHED WORK
Arts Hub Australia, 10th June 2008
Sydney Film Festival kicked off last week with an Opening Night Gala screening of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky, a lot of red carpet and almost as much bling. Clare Stewart tells us how a spoonful of glam helps the Festival go down.
Sydney Film Festival’s Executive Director Claire Stewart sounds as though she has contingency plans in her pockets and a limber stride in which to take all eventualities. One wonders whether she’s having perpetual flashbacks to the opening night film. More likely is that said film sets the tone for an exceptional year of a now quite literally extraordinary Australian film festival.
This, the event’s 55th year, sees the introduction of the Official Competition and with it the $60,000 Sydney Film Prize, to be announced on 16 June at the Sydney Opera House. Supported by the New South Wales Government, it makes SFF Australia’s first film festival to have a FIAPF-accredited Official Competition. The Prize itself is donated by SFF’s Principal sponsor, Hunter Hall Investment Management, along with a unique award created by Australia’s Dinosaur Designs.
With a selection comprising 3 world premières and 9 Australian premières, the Competition puts the SFF on a footing with similarly sized film festivals internationally, and raises the stakes within its homeland.
“[It's] bringing a big streak of glamour into the mix… but it’s really designed to create higher-profile screenings that have wider appeal for audiences, to create a broader interest, and the public face of that is the red carpet gala screenings,” Stewart says.
Local conjuring of the fabled glitz of distant shores is undoubtedly a drawcard for industry devotees, but rather than be left empty-handed once the last VIP pass has swished past the cordon, festival-goers will have the opportunity to follow up on the evening’s proceedings with morning-after repeat screenings and lunchtime talks by the films’ respective directors.
“Again,” says Stewart, “it’s about giving greater access for the public to the filmmakers.”
A strategic sideline to pleasing the punters is the development of a low-key yet high-impact industry program, allowing the Sydney film industry to showcase its wares to international guests.
Stewart explains: “It’s really designed to create opportunities for local industry to engage with those guests and explore potential business opportunities, as well as working with the [Film and Television Office] to give our international guests location and facilities tours and so forth.
“It’s also about repositioning the Festival in terms of the international arena and certainly we’ve found that that has had a really strong response, in the sense that sales agents and distributors have seen an increased value in giving films to the Festival. I think that’s really reflected in the fact that we negotiated three of the films that were selected for Cannes – two of which have just taken out major awards there,” she continues, “so the strategy for this year has been very much [about] enhancing the program locally, but also coming out with something that strongly positions the festival internationally.”
An Australian competition of international standing needs a figurehead of comparable stature, and for Stewart the choice was a clear one.
“I felt very committed to the notion in the first year of the [Competition] that we should have an Australian [Jury] President,” says Stewart. “As it’s an international competition we don’t anticipate that that will always be the case but it was really important to make a strong statement with a great Australian representative.”
Enter Gillian Armstrong, one of a select handful of names occupying the upper echelons of Australian cinema and a formidable presence internationally. Named in an announcement at Cannes as Jury President for the inaugural Official Competition, Armstrong’s credentials and history with the Festival meant that she had almost assumed the role before anyone realised it.
“Gillian really fits the bill in so many ways,” Stewart enthuses. “Obviously, her own career path has exhibited all of those values that we’re looking for in the Competition films: [her work is] courageous, audacious, cutting edge.
“She’s also had such a terrific history with the Festival – which screened her early short films – and she’s been a patron for many years and a really big supporter.”
Joining Armstrong on the Jury are international luminaries Majid Majidi and Nansun Shi, along with a third international representative and a compatriot for Armstrong.
Iranian director/writer/producer Majidi’s film The Song of Sparrows, screening at this year’s Festival, took out the Best Actor gong for Reza Najie at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year. Internationally and critically acclaimed, Majidi’s writing and directing efforts garnered an Academy Award nomination in 1997 for The Children of Heaven.
“Majidi’s someone whose filmmaking I’ve admired for many years,” Stewart says of his selection to the Jury. “He’s been one of the core group of filmmakers who’s really put Iranian film on the world map if you like, The Children of Heaven of course being the only Iranian film that’s ever received an Academy nod.”
Seeking to represent a broad range of interests and experiences, Stewart looked to the redoubtable production credentials of Nansun Shi, whose Hong Kong company Film Workshop marks its 25th year in operation in 2009.
“[I thought her] producer credibility was very important. The Competition does recognise producers, so it was very important to have a producer of significant standing and Nansun is certainly that,” Stewart says.
“She has a long line of very impressive Hong Kong and China credits behind her. Most recently and [best] known to a wider audience would be the fact that she Executive Produced Infernal Affairs, which is the film that Scorsese made into The Departed. Film Workshop… has certainly produced some of the most outstanding successes in Hong Kong cinema: the Once Upon a Time in China series, the Chinese Ghost Story series$$s$$ so she brings a whole depth of knowledge and experience to the Jury as well.”
Most significantly, the work of all three filmmakers exhibits the qualities sought in the Official Competition films: as stated by Stewart in reference to the defining characteristics of Armstrong’s career, it is courageous, audacious and cutting-edge.
These qualities have been sought and found in many forms, explains Stewart: “[They are] fantastic criteria to work with because… we really chose those specifically to mirror the energy and the vibrancy of Sydney itself$$s$$ we felt that they represented the city in many ways, and looking for them in terms of the selection of the first Competition line-up, I felt that they could be identified in many different ways. So the program itself is certainly very broad$$s$$ there’s not the sense that it’s all one type of film.
“I looked for those qualities in terms of bold stylistic choices, and then there are some films here that exhibit [them] in a real emotional sense. I think it’s present in performances,” Stewart states, citing those of recently-lauded Sally Hawkins, the star of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky and recipient of the Best Actress award at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, as well as the players in Australian Matthew Newton’s film Three Blind Mice. Stewart adds a nod to screenwriters, musing, “[It’s] in the scripting process as well, so films like In Bruges and The Square both have really bold scripts that take the film in very unexpected directions”.
The jewel in Stewart’s – and consequently the Festival’s – already sparkly 2008 crown was Happy-Go-Lucky’s prime position as the Opening Night Gala film. Stewart describes her first encounter with the film almost as one might roll out the tale of meeting the (wo)man one feels destined to marry: “It’s quite an amazing moment when you’re in the middle of a film and realise you’re going to choose it for your opening night, and then you walk out and get on the phone and start the negotiations,” she says, seemingly still flushed from the experience.
And with good reason. A departure of approach if not essence for Leigh, the uncharacteristically lighthearted film has received widespread praise from all points along the viewer scale. This – as Stewart explains it, “narrative drama about a person who is permanently happy” – is the tale of Poppy, an unremittingly optimistic London teacher, and would appear to be in rather startling contrast to Leigh’s customary fare.
“It’s really interesting because it is a departure for Mike Leigh and at the same time it’s very wedded to some of his traditional concerns,” says Stewart. “Everyone really remembers the grimmer Mike Leigh films but actually he’s got a great background in comedy and some of his earlier television comedy is sensational.
“[It was interesting] seeing it in the context of a press and industry screening in Berlin where everyone is notoriously secretive in the audience about their response – everyone’s quiet, no one’s giving anything away – and halfway through this film [is] this fantastic flamenco classroom scene. There was this massive round of applause from that particular audience and I thought ‘He has made a winner’.”
Stewart herself may be onto several other winners throughout the program, not the least of which is a strand focussing on contemporary Mexican cinema.
“It’s been an incredibly strong year for Mexican cinema,” Stewart says emphatically. “Filmmakers like Alejandro Gonzàles Iñàrritu and Guillermo del Toro are making extremely auteur-driven works that are breaking out to much bigger audiences and this seems to have created an environment on the home front that is really supporting more auteur-driven work.
“The three films that we’re focussing on in the Mexican Focus are all very different… but all exhibit strong new directorial talent with really clear visions about the kind of films they’re making. That’s reflected too back in our Competition selection [and] the fact that two of the films in competition are Mexican films (Fernando Eimbcke’s Lake Tahoe and Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light.
Back again this year following Stewart’s 2007 instigation of new program strands are the Kids’ Films, Accessible Cinema and Sounds On Screen programs, all designed to further broaden the inclusivity of the Festival, as well as the experience of cinema overall for an audience who might not otherwise get involved – namely young children, people with a disability and those for whom a cabaret setting is far preferable to the cloistered uniformity of cinema seating.
It would be a task to find a hole of neglect in Stewart’s demographic vision for the Sydney Film Festival, and though its focus may shift from year to year, country to country, it is harder still to imagine the individual who feels skipped over entirely. In any case that individual is unlikely to be the recipient of the Sydney Film Prize – most would skip over their own parents for that.
Sydney Film Festival, 4 – 22 June 2008
