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TracySYDNEY UNDERGROUND FESTIVAL
August 1st 2007 00:27
Inspired by the feisty experimental filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, the first Sydney Underground Film Festival will have four nights of provocative and political screenings when Sydney is shut down for the APEC meeting in September.
The co-directors, Stefan Popescu and Katherine Berger, a promotional flyer that has John Howard in a Nazi uniform has alreday emerged. It has prompted an angry death threat over the phone.
Berger says that holding the festival during APEC is a "happy coincidence" rather than a plan to encourage activism against the event.
She believes Australian films have become too conservative. "Because the industry is quite small, people are always fighting to get noticed. They tend to make films that are following a formula to get funding."
The festival, held at the Factory Theatre in Enmore, is intended to encourage more political film-making - in both subject matter and a more experimental approach. "In Berlin or New York, they would turn their nose up at the idea now of the underground," Popescu says. "But here, we haven't really got a culture of resistance, of subversive art."
Sp far, the festival has attracted nearly 800 entries."We're trying to create a nationwide alliance where we can nurture this culture of alternative films," Popescu says. "Film has been used for really horrible things in the past, propaganda and so forth during Nazi times. I think it can be used for good. "It's relevant now more than ever, with the war in Iraq, that we become overtly political."
The veteran director David Perry, who was part of the underground movement in the 1960s, applauds the push for more political film-making. "I had this romantic notion that underground meant the French underground - fighting the Nazis," he says. "But the younger people saw underground as just being opposed to the prevailing culture [which was] extremely repressive and conservative."
Despite Romulus, My Father centring on an immigrant family and Lucky Miles focusing on refugees, Perry believes many recent Australian films have been disappointing for lacking an interest in politics. "There seems to be a serious degree of conservatism that has crept back into the system," he says.
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