“It’s important to us, to be providing that platform.” Over 2,300 entries were submitted to Flickerfest 2015 and the festival has chosen 110 of them as part of the national tour across Australia. 20 different short film programmes will be screened during the ten-day festival season. Apart from 14 competitive programmes consisting of five international, seven Australian and two documentary in competition, Flickerfest has an environmental themed programme, GreenFlicks, and a student programme, FlickerUp, featuring productions from primary and high schools across the country. There’s a tribute to the Oscars in the Oscar Favourites programmes; a family programmes, FlickerKids, a selection of comedy shorts, Short Laughs; and a look at modern relationships in the Love Bites programmes.
For the BAFTA and Academy Award accredited festival, now in its 24th year, Kidd has curated a special Melbourne-only screening, Made in Melbourne, to kick off the film festival, a programme which includes a few films made in regional Victoria as well. “I’ve curated a programme of nine films from Victoria,” says Kidd. “They are of an incredible standard. There’s a good broad view of the talented film makers coming up taking us on real journeys along different paths.” Is there a special something that might define the Made in Melbourne films on offer? “They are covering important topics,” Kidd replies. “You think of short films and you think of jokes or gags, but you could say these films tend towards the profound, as well as looking at relationships, and at life. They have varied things to say. There’s a beautiful humanity to them; if there is a unifying theme then it’s that they’re looking a little deeper into everyday life. These films are exploring things in beautiful intimate stories, bringing them to light, and not just utilising the craft of film makers but involving the talent and the complexity of storytelling. What really impresses me about the Made in Melbourne programme is the maturity and sophistication of the stories. It’s sophisticated storytelling.” Ah, well, we know it, but we still like to hear it.
“A couple of films look at the Sudanese experience,” continues Kidd. “There are a lot of Sudanese living in Shepparton. They’re a small minority of refugees within Australia. The film Fabric looks at the experience of Katrina, a Sudanese girl at high school, she’s just starting out in the country and she’s being ostracised around the time the school formal is coming up. She meets a local boy, Charlie, who changes things for her.”
One of the films in Made in Melbourne is the winner of the Sydney Academy Award Accredited Virgin Australia Best Short Film. “The winning film, Grey Bull, is about a Sudanese man who works at an abattoir,” Kidd explains. “He saves a bull because he believes it is a spiritual token. But this spiritual thing goes against him, it causes problems and jeopardises his chances of fully integrating in the community around him. A film made in one shot, Rhododendron, is about living in the inner city area in the early hours of the morning. The character confronts his noisy neighbours who are playing doof doof music, which at 4am is the most annoying music in the world. It’s made in a beautiful way, all filmed in one shot and you go on that journey. It creates a gritty inner urban experience. Rabbit is about a very young man, a tragic young man, from a damaged background and his foreign-born girlfriend. He brings his girlfriend into the family home. It’s about men in crisis and it’s beautifully edgy, not playing to type, but it is redemptive at the end. He connects with family after years of not having a family.”
The lineup for the rest of Made in Melbourne includes Building Bridges which takes a metaphorical look at misunderstandings and our reluctance to embrace ambivalence and ambiguity; She Was She is a film about a sibling with good intentions who thinks she knows best for her ailing sister; Love Hurts is a cross-genre comic thriller, another film about sisters, sibling rivalry and lost love set in a hotel on the eve of a wedding. This one has a surprising twist. Falling features Ethan, a young man overwhelmed by the demands of his relationship with a young woman who’s bipolar where he believes he knows what he needs to do next; I’m You Dickhead gives a young man a chance to go back in time to hang out with his ten year old self and maybe better equip him for romantic success. Waterborne brings truly nightmarish events to a country town where there really is something in the water, something that affects the local wildlife as well as the human population.
BY LIZA DEZFOULI
