by Dov Kornits
“With any festival, you’d probably get like five or six filmmakers that will contact you and say, ‘your taste is in your arse, you don’t know what’s going on, don’t you realise blah, blah, blah,’” St Kilda Film Festival Director Richard Sowada answers after we ask him about the job of narrowing down the 600+ entries that the festival received this year.
“I don’t dismiss them. This is all part of the critical process for filmmakers and for us as well, to talk about how an event like a film festival comes together.
“I look at all the films, I watch all the films. We also have an assessment panel that look at them too, who I lean on from time to time with advice.
“Primarily, the films in the festival talk to each other and often we will see good films that don’t get into the festival because either they say things that other films already have said or are saying, or they don’t relate to the other films.
“I try and mirror the filmmaking process as much as I can, so we can have a very strong conceptual type program. I look at the films as my shots. I look at sessions as the scenes within the film and then as they are fitted together as a whole event, that’s my film!
“So, that’s the way that I look at it and I put myself in the shoes of the filmmaker who may be making a film. You might shoot the best shot that you have ever shoot in your entire career, but if it doesn’t have a relationship to the story that you’re trying to tell, you don’t put it in the movie. The festival is my movie, and so I try and make everything relate to each other and that gives it its conversation and personality. It allows me to shine a light on films in a different kind of a way where even the filmmakers can look at their own film and go, ‘you know what? I never saw that relationship before.’ That’s the heart of it.”
The last two years have been challenging for all festivals, including St Kilda. “If COVID has taught me and the festival anything, it is where our audience is and how to reach them,” says Sowada. “The last two years we’ve been online and then partly physical last year. In 2020, we got 44,000 people looking at the festival online. Last year we had 34,000 in a hybrid event.
“The online environment allows us to reach audiences nationally, it allows us to experiment with things.”
This year’s online component includes two programs from the Scottish Documentary Institute and a Warwick Thornton retrospective. “There’s three of his short films from AFTRS when he was studying cinematography. Then there are two films after he graduated. That’s to give a perspective of his creative thinking from the very early emerging period. We’re also doing some of the programs, once they’ve screened in the real world, they’re going online.”
As much as he loves experimenting with the format, the big ticket item is still the physical screenings of the film in a cinema.
“The power of the physical experience is that it is so heightened and amplified. That’s something we also take into account when we’re programming the events. The power of the screen in reaching people, especially something like The Astor, which has to be one of the biggest screens in Victoria, if not the country… That’s a thing for us, the power of the experience.”
And it’s an experience that the public are equally excited about.
“The response has been amazing,” Sowada tells us about the pre-sales. You can already tell that screenings are going to sell out. We’re talking about a 900 seat house, so there’s certainly no diminished interest in a cinema experience. It’s really about what that experience is and how that experience is contextualised that is the key. The key is in intelligent discussion, intelligent programming, thinking about the audience and thinking about the context, and the context is the thing that speaks to the audience. That is the defining point, not just with the St Kilda Film Festival, but with the industry at large. We spend a lot of time thinking about the event and programming the event in that kind of direct way with audiences, and I think that’s the spark.”
