We Festivalists can't get enough of film festivals. We've just wrapped the 2nd edition of Young at Heart and the Possible Worlds Tour. We're about to host Kino#3 and are already planning for a mystery event to be held later this year. It's exhausting work!
So today I thought I'd take some time off and see a movie at the French Film Festival, Christophe Honoré's amazing Dans Paris. It's my ninth film (and one of my favourites) at a festival with its share of great titles. But of course, the one we're all really waiting for is just around the corner... the Sydney Film Festival is back in June!
So you can imagine how excited I was to receive a text on my way home: a reliable source informing me that the new website of the Sydney Film Festival had just gone live! I ran the rest of the way home, and I wasn't disappointed. This is not just some cynical marketing exercise... Not only do we get a preview of the stunning visual identity for 2007 (including some moody photography and a sh*t-hot new logo), but more importantly, there's a sneak peak at the program.
We learn that there will be a spotlight on Turkey (which is great news as it's a national cinema I know very little about - and I'm sure I speak for many of us), a sidebar just for kids (though I suspect a few adults might sneak in too), a John Huston retrospective and a program of films about or made by people with a disability.
The World Views program will bring us some of the best titles in new world cinema - films sourced at major festivals around the world by Artistic Director Clare Stewart and programmer Jenny Neighbour. Manoel de Oliveira's Belle toujours (a sequel of sorts to Luis Buñuel's Belle de jour) is in there, as is Jia Zhang-Ke's thought-provoking Still Life. André Téchiné's Les Témoins gets an Australian premiere, and there's an intriguing South African comedy named after a curry bun. Just enough to whet our appetite.
What impressed me most about the website is that it draws you in, providing a behind-the-scenes glimpse at what it takes to put on an event of this scale. There are insights into the programmers' travels (which if expanded, would make for a very readable blog), a bit about the making of the visual identity, and you even get to know the (mostly) new members of the team a little (the instant noodle moment in The Host rocks). For all of us Sydneysiders, this is, after all, our festival.
The Festival takes place June 8th to 24th and the full program will be announced on May 9th. I, for one, can hardly wait.
-MR
