The future of the worlds largest short film festival hangs in the balance. Can Tropfest survive? And, if not, what’s the loss to Australia’s film industry?
Love complicates the complex marriage deals arranged by parents on the island of Tanna, though rarely with such profound ramifications as those depicted in the film.
Contact Films
The new Australian film Tanna, which won two awards at Venice Film Festival, is as much a tale about romance as it is globalisation.
Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, Disney Studios Vice President Mary Ann Hughes and Screen Queensland CEO Tracey Vieira pose at Village Roadshow Studios on the Gold Coast last week.
AAP Image/Dave Hunt
David Court, Australian Film, Television and Radio School and Abi Tabone, Australian Film, Television and Radio School
For every film, specialists are employed for everything from rigging the lights executing the stunts. The announcement of two major new productions coming to Australia will develop that expertise.
The Academy Award-winning penguins in Happy Feet sit in a long and distinguished history of Australian animation.
AAP/Roadshow
This year marks the centenary of Australian animation. Alongside some memorable international successes, animation has long been significant to the industry.
The Doof Warrior in Mad Max: Fury Road is a red-jumpsuited, masked guitarist, bungee-strapped to the front of the Doof Wagon, a massive, mobile speaker stack, replete with on-board drummers. What’s not to love?
Should the offset for screen producers apply to all films made in Australia? Yes, even the ones that ruffle a few feathers.
mark sebastian/Flickr
David Court, Australian Film, Television and Radio School
The producers of a creationist doc took advantage of Screen Australia’s tax offsets. Were they exploiting a loophole? Hardly – and there’s good reason why producers of all films should enjoy such benefits.
George Miller’s Mad Max films have aged remarkably well – perhaps because they have had such a profound influence on the films that followed them.
Australian producers are struggling to face challenges imposed by a changing screen industry – and greater transparency will benefit everyone.
AAP Image/Gaye Gerard
David Court, Australian Film, Television and Radio School and Andrea Buck, Australian Film, Television and Radio School
There is an emerging push for greater transparency in the industry about how films are funded and the profits they return. But can sharing information can help a financially risky industry into the black?
Critics looking to make sense of Australian screen culture might do well to leave the cinemas and check out YouTube.
Instagram
Weirdness is one of the most distinctive features of Aussie cinema. From Jim Sharman’s kooky debut feature Shirley Thompson Versus The Aliens (1972) to the sublime spookiness of Picnic at Hanging Rock…
Screen production can enhance our understanding of the complexities of human experience.
locrifa/ Shutterstock.com
In the film industry, research is commonly understood as audience research. Films, in contrast, are entertainment or a form of audiovisual communication. But can film-making also be a form of academic…
2010’s Animal Kingdom – one of many films to benefit from the legacies of the Whitlam government.
EPA/Simon Mein/Sony Pictures
Filmmakers and audiences – indeed Australian arts and screen culture more broadly – owe a deep debt of gratitude to Gough Whitlam and the government he led. Although the foundations had been laid by Whitlam’s…
It’s not just money that emerging filmmakers need – they also need help getting their work screened.
vancouverfilmschool
Earlier this year The Conversation published an article by Rebecca Mostyn about the audience for Australian films. The article includes useful stats pertaining to Screen Australia’s slate of feature films…
The film adaptation of Robyn Davidson’s memoir Tracks explores how both travellers and tourists experience the Australian landscape.
In the new film Wolf Creek 2, the menacing outback serial killer Mick Taylor asks his unsuspecting tourist prey, “what the bloody hell are you buggers doing out here?” This phrase could equally be used…
Indian-Australian co-productions such as Besharam are part of an expanding cosmopolitan Bollywood.
Reliance Entertainment
It’s 101 years since the birth of Bollywood, the world’s largest and most vibrant movie industry and, of course, that’s more than enough time to mature and alter, to grow arms and legs. For some time…
The 3rd AACTA Awards could have been renamed A Celebration of Baz.
Tracey Nearmy/AAP
In retrospect, it seems a foregone conclusion that The Great Gatsby would have blitzed the 3rd AACTA Awards, held in Sydney last week. As a A$120 million budget film that took more than A$28 million at…