Melbourne Underground Film Festival
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Melbourne Underground Film Festival

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“I think we’ve discovered some of the most important filmmakers that have come out of this country in the last 15 years. James Wan, who went on to do the Saw movies in Hollywood, Greg McLean, who did Wolf Creek [2005], the Sheffield brothers who did that film about time travel [How To Time Travel] out at the moment, Patrick Hughes, who recently directed The Expendables 3 [2014] and is doing The Raid next…and many other people, who are less well-known,” explains Wolstencroft enthusiastically over his fruit juice.

 

It’s apparent from his avid chatter that Wolstencroft is a reservoir of cinematographic knowledge, consolidated by years of extensive movie watching and critiquing. His catalogue of influences include the classic works of Hitchcock to drama aficionado Lindsay Anderson (The Sporting Life, The Whales of August) to Stanley Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange, The Shining) and John Ford (The Searchers, The Grapes of Wrath) — “I’ve got a pretty large film vocabulary. I could probably talk to you all day about the filmmakers I like,” confesses the Festival Director, before he crafts a considered answer about what draws people towards cinema. “I have reasonably complex ideas about cinema. I mean, cinema is what [German composer] Wagner was aiming for with his last cycle of operas that he called Gesamtkunstwerk, which means ‘total artwork’. I think cinema is a total artwork because it involves sculpture, photography, theatre, literature, [musical] composition [and] just about every art-form there is. It’s all there in cinema. So, to me, [film] is the supreme art-form [and immersion].”

 

Despite being the avant-garde of the arts, cinema still needs to evolve; hence, spurring MUFF’s theme this year: Evolve or Die. The past 15 years has seen every filmmaker, including Wolstencroft, face the gradual transition of physical film to digital film. Though digital film has revolutionised the manipulation, projection and technique of film, Wolstencroft believes it’s dissolved an inherent quality of cinema: to tell exciting, gritty and original stories. It’s something he believes that Australian cinema is slowly regaining since MUFF’s genesis.

 

“They’re trying to imitate the cinema of Ken Loach (Catchy Come Home, Route Irish) and Mike Leigh (Naked, Topsy-Turvy), who are two English left-wing filmmakers that make films about the working class,” explains the film enthusiast, illustrating that Australian cinema has turned into a playground of amateur doppelgängers who are simply appeasing their funders desires, whom happen to be big Loach and Leigh fans. “I’m not so sure about the wisdom of that.

 

“There’s something unique about Australian culture and I think it’s great to see it expressed through cinema, but I don’t think you need an Aborigine playing a didgeridoo and kangaroos bouncing around in the yard [to capture that],” stresses the Festival Director vehemently. “There’s lists of different ethnic communities [in Australia]. There’s a lot of different lifestyles and lots of different stories to tell and I think we should reflect that. [Not] a whole cinema [culture] dedicated to cultural Marxism. I always liked the kind of films that were not-by-Hollywood, which were Australian action, horror, science-fiction, Mad Max — that kind of thing. That was the kind of film-making that I admired and with MUFF we attempt to foster the low-budget version of that.”

 

Wolstencroft also emphasises that we should focus on multi-layered stories reflective of our identity and culture as a nation, and that this identity should not be secluded to social activism films. Whether this identity is explored through anarchist crime in opening night film Start.Options.Exit., through How To Time Travel, a romantic imaginative science-fiction from  the Melbourne-based Sheffield brothers, or through Australians’ inherent affinity for a criminal redeemed in An Evening With Chopper Read. To the filmmaker and MUFF founder what matters most is that we support our local film industry with as much vigour as we do internationally.

 

“I think we’re in the middle of a revolution right now. It’s just really beginning to change,” propositions Wolstencroft, iterating how our cinematic voice is fiercer than 15 years ago. “It’s a very important time [for us] to make a really aggressive, relevant, internationally-respected local cinema that goes to a lot of the overseas festivals. That’s what we want: to see a lot of these local films getting into major film Festivals, like the Cannes, and being played. [Until then] we must keep plugging away and spreading the good word [while] we embrace the new and keep the old. That’s what we mean by Evolve or Die basically.”

 

BY AVRILLE BYLOK-COLLARD