F.Y.I.

Queensland Film Festival to launch in July

The Queensland Film Festival will launch on July 24, running to July 26.

The announcement:

Brisbane’s cultural calendar will welcome a new film-focused event in July 2015, with the launch of the Queensland Film Festival (QFF). An annual international festival championing excellence and variety in cinema, QFF will showcase the very best in film from around the world.

Hosted at New Farm Six Cinemas from July 24 to 26, the festival will screen a dozen feature films and supporting short films in a curated program.

QFF’s debut line-up includes Philippe Garrel’s Jealousy, Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy, and Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s The Forbidden Room, as well as emerging local works such as Eight by first-time Brisbane filmmaker Peter Blackburn.

Organised by film lovers for film lovers, QFF will offer a truly immersive festival experience. Screenings will be supplemented by events and conversations that take the love of film beyond the cinema, including panel discussions and in-foyer chats with local and visiting critics, scholars, and filmmakers.

David Stratton, Australia’s best-known film critic, is QFF’s patron, and sees his role as a new chapter in a long history championing film in Brisbane. “My first contact with film culture in Queensland was in 1966 when, as the director of the Sydney Film Festival, I was able to help with the establishment of the Brisbane Film Festival,” Stratton advises.

“In some way, Brisbane’s international film festival has been a part of my year ever since. I always looked forward to travelling up for BIFF. Unbelievably, next year it will be 50 years since that first Brisbane Film Festival, and I’m very pleased to support QFF in reintroducing this kind of film festival for local audiences.”

QFF is also pleased to announce that ABC Radio National film critic Jason Di Rosso will be a festival guest in 2015.  Di Rosso brings a critical eye to QFF’s first year of offerings.

“I’ve always cherished my experiences at film festivals, and the best ones have been about seeing films in the company of other cinematic travellers that challenge me and expand my thinking,” says Di Rosso. “It’s wonderful to see Brisbane getting another film event that’s committed to showing exciting, challenging work.

“The festival will focus on two things: showing outstanding, recent international art cinema; and providing a space to think about and discuss these fascinating, challenging films,” says QFF co-director Dr Huw Walmsley-Evans.

“Queensland Film Festival follows in a proud tradition of Brisbane film culture,” continues Walmsley-Evans. “We want to return to the grass roots of the early Brisbane Film Festivals, showing and discussing important international films that won’t get a release, even in the arthouses and travelling national film festivals.”

“The four films announced today indicate Queensland Film Festival’s commitment to quality and variety,” festival co-director John Edmond continues. “There’sJealousy, the latest work by a French master director; the highly anticipated The Duke of Burgundy; and Eight, a claustrophobic local effort shot in one bravura take. We’re also thrilled to screen the The Forbidden Room, which imagines a delirious alternative history for early cinema as it jumps from lurid tale to lurid tale.”

QFF’s inaugural venue, the New Farm Six Cinemas, furthers the festival’s ties to Brisbane’s film history: it was the venue for the first four Brisbane Film Festivals from 1966 to 1969. Owners Peter and Stephen Sourris, who extensively renovated and reopened the historic site in August 2014, are excited to have the venue once again play host to a major film festival.

“Before it was the New Farm Six it was the Village Twin, and before that it was the Astor Theatre. The Astor Theatre hosted those first Brisbane Film Festivals. There’s been a cinema on this site since the days of silent film, and the festivals in the ‘60s are an important part of our story,” says Stephen Sourris.

The festival’s co-directors are Brisbane locals who met while doing post-graduate research in film at the University of Queensland. John Edmond is an associate curator at UQ Art Museum responsible for the organisation’s film program. Dr Huw Walmsley-Evans is a film critic and researcher, as well as the essays editor of online film magazine Screen Machine and contributing editor for Manuscript magazine.

In future years QFF plans to live up to its name, touring a selection of films to major regional centres. In 2015, the festival looks forward to focusing Brisbane’s film community on a mid-year celebration of international cinema, with further details and the full program line-up to be announced closer to the event.

Source: QFF media release

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