St Kilda Film Festival 2009

Editorial

26 – 31 May, 2009

The St Kilda Film Festival is one of the best-known short film festivals in Australia – and one of the longest-running. Festival Director and Film Buff Paul Harris took some time out to tell us about what’s on offer this year.

How long have you been the Festival Director now, Paul?

Since last century now. I started in 1999, so this is my eleventh festival. But I’ve only got one or two more festivals in me. I’m reaching the twilight. I was hoping for the St Kilda Triangle stuff to be settled, because the idea was that the whole festival would happen down there. But it’s never going to happen, not in our lifetimes. With the recession, it will all quietly fade away.

What is it that you love about short films?

The main attraction of short films is the unearthing of new talent, and the very rare opportunity that filmmakers have to be innovative and explore the medium, and be allowed to make mistakes. There’s nothing at stake if you make a short film as a tentative first step in the water, and it’s a failure, you’ve learnt from that experience. But if you get the break to go and make a feature film, and you fail at that, you won’t be invited back. A lot of filmmakers I speak with who do have successful careers do look back with nostalgia on short films, because they could express themselves much more freely.

Has the increasingly accessible digital video technology made it easier to make short films? And is that necessarily a good thing?

Those technologies have made it easier to make films, and also made it a lot easier to make bad films. The challenge is still the same, and that’s to produce work that will attract public attention. I’ve  always argued it doesn’t really matter if you have access to expensive equipment, or you’ve had the good fortune to attend film school, it’s really the uniqueness of your vision that ultimately matters.

The quality of Australian short films is very strong again this year. Is this something you’ve noticed over your time as director?

You can quantify the confidence of Australian short films. Look at short films over the last decade, like Cracker Bag and Harvie Krumpet, which both had outstanding international success, and all during a period when our feature films were becoming “off the nose” at the box office. It was the short films that were carrying the banner for local filmmaking. Now that’s starting to pay off, with people Joel Edgerton and Cracker Bag’s director Glendyn Ivin, and Adam Elliot of course, now graduating to features.

What are some of the highlight programmes that we shouldn’t miss this year?

We’ve got a programme of short films from Mexico – how topical! And they’re all on the subject of death. Which in Mexico is a very lively topic, and it’s not as morbid as it sounds. I’m excited by a couple of forums on anthology films, and we’re screening Little Deaths, an anthology of films from a number of directors linked together by a guy working a tollbooth. We’re also doing a forum on Five Easy Pizzas, which a series of five short comedies made in 1995 which ran before features in the cinema, and they’re linked by a pizza delivery guy. We’re going to run the five films, and then talk about this whole project. It was something that’s only happened once in Australia, and probably won’t happen again. SoundKilda is happening again, and we have the Festival Co-ordinator from Clermont-Ferrand, and a programmer from interfilm in Berlin attending, and they’re bringing out programmes of short films.

And what some of your personal favourites?

Tin Can Heart is an animation about a robot in a futuristic society, and it’s identical to Wall-E, but the filmmaker informed me that he’d been working on this for three or four years without knowing about Wall-E. He’s had difficulty getting it into festivals because they think he’s ripped it off. But it’s a very impressive piece of animation. We even have a live-action version of Wall-E, again made in 2007 before Wall-E came out. But they’re interesting because there’s something out there in the Zeitgeist. The other thing of interest is that there are a lot of films by actors this year. Nathan Phillips and Peter O’Brien, and comedian Bob Franklin have all made short films. This is becoming more pronounced each year; actors making films in their downtime, which I imagine they have a lot of.

The St Kilda Film Festival’s Opening Night is at the Palais Theatre in St Kilda, Tuesday 26 May, and the festival runs until 31 May at the Palace George in St Kilda before it starts a national tour.

For more information, visit http://www.stkildafilmfestival.com.au/

Tim Hunter,
Citysearch

See also:

St Kilda Film Festival's Hottest 100

St Kilda Restaurants