Antenna Documentary Film Festival announces dates
The Antenna International Documentary Film Festival will debut this year at Sydney’ Chauvel Cinema from 5 to 9 October.
The festival, with 28 feature documentaries will also include nearly $10,000 in prize money spread across three categories.
Films will compete for either the SBS Award for Best International Documentary ($5,000), Award for Best Australian Documentary ($2500), or a student competition in association with AFTRS ($2,000).
In a statement, Antenna Founding Director David Rokach said, “I have seen the impact that documentary film festivals have in other countries, not just in the development of new audiences for documentary but also in the quality of the films being produced. We thought a festival dedicated exclusively to documentary would be a great contribution to Australia and we hope Antenna will become a fruitful platform for presenting the complexities of the world we live in. We look to present films that will challenge audiences, while also being relevant.”
Matchmaking mayors, pool parties, nuclear waste and the Australian premiere of Robert Nugent’s Memoirs of a Plague – about the relationship between humans and locusts – all get a look in to the festival program.
Other highlights include Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity, Robin Hessman’s My Perestroika and Sounak Chakravorty’s The Bengali Detective. There will also be a free screening of celebrated French filmmaker Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, a meditation on the human memory, presented by National Film and Sound Archive and Alliance Francaise Sydney, and followed by a lecture about Marker’s work.
For more information, visit www.antennafestival.org
