London Goes Down Under
12th London Australian Film Festival
News Feature by Daniel Laverick
The 2nd - 12th March saw the 12th London Australian film festival take place at the Barbican. This popular festival saw a plethora of screenings highlighting the best of modern Aussie cinema including shorts, features and documentaries.
The Proposition, starring Ray Winstone, Guy Pearce and John Hurt, opened this year’s festival, providing a glitzy star studded beginning to ten days of diverse cinema. The stars of The Proposition were in attendance along with musician and director Nick Cave. Seventeen new feature films were screened; showcasing the best of what Australia has to offer to cinemagoers, undoubtedly providing the most informed overview of today’s Aussie cinema in the UK. The shorts programme in association with Flickerfest screened a selected short before each of the main features that were on the festival programme, granting some much deserved exposure for the current crop of talent emerging from down under.
This year the festival also included the London edition of Tropfest; the Sydney based open-air short film festival that attracts upwards of 150,000 people who gather to watch sixteen finalist films from over 700 entries. Although the London version didn’t quite hit these audience figures it did nevertheless prove to be popular with the UK audience. The documentary section showcased a number of acclaimed and award winning Australian documentaries highlighting the renowned skills of the countries directors and technicians who are slowly gaining a reputation for producing high quality factual films.
To finish off the festival, the Barbican’s ever-popular weekly family film club screened Australian shorts and held related workshops throughout March, plus screenings of Sally Marshall is Not an Alien and the animated film Dot and the Whale.
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