Festival Director Simon Foster Talks SCIENCE FICTION FILM FESTIVAL 2022
SYDNEY SCIENCE FICTION FILM FESTIVAL 2022 kicks off this Thursday (August 25) at Event Cinemas George St and this year is expanding to Melbourne at Cinema Nova to run concurrently then headed to Event Cinemas’ locations in Tuggerah (NSW), Shellharbour (NSW), Marion (SA), Whitford (WA), Palmerston (NT) and Brisbane City (QLD).
We caught up with festival director Simon Foster to talk about this year’s program, the interstate expansion and the challenges involved in organising a festival of this magnitude.
This year the festival extends interstate, with Melbourne occurring concurrently with Sydney. How many films are in the program and will the programming be the same Australia-wide?
We are pushing out nine features as In Competition titles, seven of which are Australian premieres. We have two retro-titles – the classic Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, from a 4K remaster of the Director’s Cut, and Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm. And then we have 50 shorts, broken down into sessions like Animation, International, Australian, Student and, for you lot down south, two sessions of Victorian-made films.
There are some constants that run across all venues. The Opening Night film, Kirsten Carthew’s Polaris, is opening every phase of the festival, and I’m shipping the gaming-inspired dramatic thriller Sight Extended to most sites. And everyone deserves to see this beautiful copy of Star Trek II, so that’s going everywhere. But I also wanted to give interstate audience some ‘Australian Premiere’ prestige content, which is why the stunning found-footage alien-abduction thriller The Alien Report will only screen in Adelaide and on the NSW south coast at Shellharbour, and the mockumentary drama Wesens, from South Africa, will only play in Darwin.
As a festival director and head programmer, what are some of the challenges you’ve faced in assembling this year’s line-up?
It was clear from early on that the COVID-19 pandemic was playing a part in how films were being made from 2020 onwards. There was some very inventive work done – the remarkable iPhone-shot short, Viewers:1, from Japanese filmmakers Daigo Hariya and Yosuke Kobayashi, is close to best of the fest – but there was also a lot of work submitted that felt underbaked. I don’t want that misinterpreted – filmmakers who picked up their device and said, “I’m gonna make a film, COVID or not!” are my heroes – but it changed the look and feel of the genre for a year. I certainly missed a sense of vast scale in many of this year’s entries, with narratives becoming very introspective, even ‘earthbound’.
And funds, of course. We are not-for-profit operation, with no grants in place for support, reaching out across the planet to bring international genre works to Australia. Then, we have to get audiences off their couches and into cinemas for one-off sessions, with nothing but our social media reach and supporters like Monster Fest to make it work. As you guys know, you’ve got to love what you do.
What film would you recommend to Monster Fest audiences to see at the festival?
Landlocked, BOOM! That was easy. Both Sydney and Melbourne the arvo of Sunday 28th; it’s a must-see. It’s a US indie crafted from 30 year-old home video footage from director Paul Owens’ family movies. He has made a dark fantasy about a video camera that presents a portal into his family’s past, which works as a sly indictment of our obsession with nostalgia. If I had to categorise it, it’s Lynch-ian with a dash of Donnie Darko, but its mostly a completely unique vision. You should also see Mongrel, the new short from director Nik Kacevski, who did the Skinford films.
You’re closing out the festival with the underrated 1983 Sci-Fi opus BRAINSTORM, what is it about the film that lead you to program it in this coveted spot?
I am determined to honour those that came before and helped build my love for science fiction; our Best feature Film award is named after the great production designer Ron Cobb. And Brainstorm director, the late Douglas Trumbull is first among equals. In between designing the effects for films like 2001 A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Blade Runner, he only directed two films – the cult classic Silent Running, which often gets screened at retro sessions, and Brainstorm, which is largely remembered for the film that Natalie Wood was working on when she died. But it is as ground-breaking in its imagining of future-tech as any of Trumbull’s works, as well as featuring a cast of Oscar-winning performers – Christopher Walken, Louise Fletcher, Cliff Robertson. Add the most beautiful score of the late James Newton Howard’s career, and it is a film that is screaming out to be rediscovered and freshly appreciated.
Sydney & Melbourne legs run this Thursday 25 to Sunday 28 August.
Tuggerah (NSW), Shellharbour (NSW), Marion (SA), Whitford (WA), Palmerston (NT) and Brisbane City (QLD) running from Friday 2 to Saturday 3 September.
