‘People really miss it’: John Polson on how and why Tropfest returned from the dead
Mumbrella goes deep with the founder of Tropfest on his motivations in bringing the world’s biggest short form film festival back to life.
The world’s largest short film festival is returning to Sydney in 2026, with a free event in Centennial Park next February likely to draw tens of thousands of people out to a night of cinema under the stars. And like many great Australian stories — this one features Bryan Brown.
Actor and director John Polson first launched Tropfest in a Darlinghurst cafe in 1993. An audience of 200 locals squeezed into the ‘homely’ Tropicana Caffe on Victoria Street to watch a series of short films shot by Polson and a bunch of ambitious amateurs.
Over the subsequent years it grew into a behemoth, spreading into The Domain in Sydney and drawing audiences in excess of 100,000 at its peak — far larger crowds than the annual Carols by Candlelight and the once thriving Big Day Out music festival ever pulled to the city.
Founder John Polson announces the return of Tropfest
After years of calling the CBD its home turf, the festival moved west in 2017, to Parramatta Park. When the three-year hosting agreement with the City of Parramatta ended in 2019, Polson weighed up Tropfest’s options from his home base in New York. Then the pandemic hit, “and the next thing you know, it’s like four or five years later.”
Throughout, Polson was fielding various long-distance offers to take the festival over, but always demurred, fearing the wrong partner would ruin the community spirit of the event.
“I’d rather no Tropfest than the wrong one,” he tells Mumbrella. “Someone comes along and tries charging money for tickets or whatever. So I just held off on all that. And then, I had a call.”
The call was from Bryan Brown.
Brown faces the media at the Tropfest launch in Sydney
It turns out the acting legend is firm friends with NRL and Racing NSW boss Peter V’landys, and the pair were hatching plans to start a short film festival. Along the way, Sarah Murdoch became involved, as did Richard Weinberg, CEO of real estate giants the Terrace Tower Group. It also turns out that Weinberg had met Polson by chance a few years earlier at a mutual friend’s house, and loosely discussed the future of Tropfest.
Recalling this earlier conversation, Weinberg proposed simply reaching out to Polson with a plan to resurrect Tropfest. It was, after all, a lot easier than launching an entirely new venture — and so Brown made the initial call.
This was last December. A five-person Zoom call later, and the wheels were set in motion.
“It was very much aligned,” Polson recalls. “They wanted to bring back Tropfest very much the way it was, but with a bit more of a formal focus on the longevity of the filmmakers, which was music to my ears, because we’ve always been a launchpad for filmmakers, but we hadn’t formalised it.”
This lead to the creation of the Tropfest Foundation, a not-for-profit with Sarah Murdoch as chair, and Polson, V’landys, Brown, and Weinberg as the board.
Through his NRL and NSW Racing connections, V’landys got Commbank to come on board as the headliner and presenter partner, while Polson locked in Youtube as ‘powered-by’ partners. Qantas soon boarded as the official airline partner, with future plans to add Tropfest films to its inflight entertainment suite.
“We were off to the races,” Polson says.
Next, there was the matter of where to stage the event. The size alone posed a number of obvious difficulties. Luckily, V’landys and Murdoch knew some people.
“Sarah and Peter reached out to the New South Wales Government — and to his credit, Premier Minns was incredibly encouraging,” Polson says. The NSW Government came on board with funding and a discount on venue hire.
“That was very much Peter and Sarah, and Premier Minns – I won’t lie to you. I bring what I bring, which is, you know, [being] the founder of the event. But the board brings connections that I don’t have.”
NSW Premier Chris Minns
Polson is keen to point out that connections in official places can only go so far.
“Obviously, connections would go a long way — but people really miss it, you know?” he says of the festival itself. “It could have gone both ways. After six years, people could have moved on from Tropfest.”
As it turns out, absence made the hearts grew fonder.
“It made people go, ‘God, that thing was even better than I remembered’. They really missed it. And so Premier Minns, to his credit, said: ‘Look, there’s lots of events coming through Sydney — one-off, this and that, a concert — but we really need some annual events, and we want Tropfest to be one of them.”
Being based in New York, Polson was shocked another short film festival hadn’t filled the void left by Tropfest since it was last staged in 2019, but concedes “the beauty — and the challenge — of Tropfest is it’s not an amazing business model.”
He has a point. “It’s really expensive,” he continues. “And I’m determined to keep it free, even though there may be some VIP ticketing here and there. I’ve always said 90% of people at Tropfest should be there for free. So, in a way, it makes sense that no one’s replaced it because it’s insane, you know?”
Tropfest once drew more than 100,000 each year.
With live music venues closing, stadium concert tickets costing hundreds of dollars for nosebleed seats, and cinemas increasingly becoming the domain of superhero movies, the idea of a free outdoor film festival starring the best up-and-coming creators seems like a necessary social balm.
“It’s a gift to Australians, I reckon. And it’s a gift to filmmakers, because it’s a massive platform,” Polson says.
“It’s a big love-fest. Not to get too sentimental, but it is. And, I think that’s partly why it’s missed.
“It’s a perfect storm for an event. Who doesn’t like an underdog story? Tropfest is all about underdogs. Who doesn’t like free [entry] you know? And there’s a bit of celebrity in there too.
“Yesterday, Martin Scorsese sent us a beautiful message on video, just congratulating us and encouraging filmmakers.” He rattles off Mad Max director George Miller and Nicole Kidman as firm supporters. “We’ve had all the biggest names as our judges and we continue to.”
Polson said he hopes to announce the “massive” name lined up as president of the jury in the next few weeks.
As well as being an annual film competition, there will also be a year-long calendar of events. The first is a digital development program for filmmakers and creators, launching this October. A series of talks, workshops and masterclasses “spanning every facet of filmmaking” will launch in February, in the run-up to the main event.
“We’re all systems go between now and February,” Polson confirms. “We’ve got big ambitions.”
Polson said he is in conversations about bringing back the school-age film competition, Trop Junior, with plans to sync it to the school calendar.
“I’m very ambitious and pretty transparent,” he continues. “I’d love to have Tropfest Outback Cinema, which is basically Tropfest on a truck going around Australia. I’m looking for a partner for that right now. We have something called Tropfest Runways, which is a year-round scholarship program that we’re working on and looking for partners for that.”
Tropfest 2015
Given Youtube is a partner, it also makes sense that Polson is currently rebuilding the Tropfest Youtube channel. He is re-uploading sharper quality videos where available, with the aid of a social media manager who he says is “deep into our YouTube archive, getting it all dusted off and presenting it to the world.”
Tomorrow will see the launch of “Trop Til You Drop”, a 24/7 live Youtube stream of selections from the three-decade back catalogue of films from the festival.
This is possible due to the contractual agreement Tropfest has with its filmmakers that gives it non-exclusive rights to stream the films, while the film-makers retain ownership and all other rights.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do over the next few months,” he notes. “But we have all the movies and we have the rights. We have the non-exclusive rights because that’s part of the deal. It’s been part of the deal almost since day one with Tropfest: We’ll give you the platform. All we ask in return is just the right to screen your film. We don’t want to own it.
“If Qantas says, ‘hey, we want to play the best Tropfest films’, we don’t want to have to make 30 calls to ask people. We need the non-exclusive rights to be able to say ‘yes’ to that.”
It may have been dormant for close to seven years by the time the festival rolls around in February, but Polson and the team are certainly making up for lost time.
“It’s a big event and we want to do it beautifully,” he declares. “But I don’t feel pressure in a bad way.
“I feel pressure in a good way. Let’s make this amazing.”
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