An institution’s long, rich history
Jenny Neighbour has been the Sydney Film Festival’s program manager for 24 years. With the festival celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, she shares how the event has evolved in a piece that first appeared in Encore.
I started at the Sydney Film Festival in November 1989. My first day on the job coincided with the Melbourne Cup and then-Festival Director Paul Byrnes’ departure for the International Documentary Festival in Leipzig.
It was a small team in those days: just a festival director, director’s secretary, administrator and company secretary, secretarial assistant and a combined role of publicist and travelling film festival manager. Around this busy core, there were myriad committee members from technical to delegates, information desk to publicity. As the festival drew closer others came to the party, including projectionists and the all-important film handler (Neil Angwin, who still fulfils this role). The festival home was a shabby terrace in Glebe Point Road, with the kind of filing cabinets that tear your nails off, and cupboards bursting with piles of yellowing paper and projection paraphernalia. The hours were long, the computers were old and so very slow, but from my very first day I loved it. But I didn’t think I’d still be here almost 25 years later.
In 1990 Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table, starring Kerry Fox as the young Janet Frame, screened on the first Sunday of my first festival as an SFF employee. The screening introduced me to the world of pain that is technical presentation; the print, newly arrived from the lab, slipped around the gate like an eel in a bucket. Nonetheless, the crowd at the State Theatre adored the film, loudly applauding Campion (now a Festival Patron) and producer Bridget Ikin. This was also the year we screened Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, a documentary made up of profiles of people who died from AIDS as remembered in the Names Project quilts; festival guests (now Oscar winners) Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Freidman stood at the back of the theatre as the credits unspooled and 2000 people reached for a tissue. I couldn’t mention the 1990 festival without including that year’s Preston Sturges retrospective: eight sublime comedies introduced by Variety critic Todd McCarthy and Kenneth Bowser, writer and director respectively of a documentary on the Hollywood master.
