Just a few years shy of its 30th birthday, Canberra's own international film festival runs this coming Friday, October 20 to Sunday, October 22 at the National Film and Sound Archive.
So many film festivals across the globe have ceased in the past few years, some not returning after COVID, some unable to navigate cinema's changing financial landscape. Even the long-running and high-profile Edinburgh Film Festival recently called in the administrators.
In the hands of film industry legend Andrew Pike, Canberra International Film Festival (CIFF) continues operating because of his decision in recent years to scale the Festival down from its former two-week run to an immersive single weekend, and moving its focus from world cinema to career retrospectives.
"In the current financial environment, and with people's time-poor lives, we decided a few years ago to reimagine our festival model," Pike says, "giving our audiences deeper understanding of significant careers worthy of celebration."
This year, Pike has chosen to focus on two filmmakers separated by almost a century, exploring the documentary work of Australian film practitioner and academic Kathryn Millard and Hollywood director Mitchell Leisen.
Sydney filmmaker Millard gave Cate Blanchett her first feature role in the 1996 film Parklands and has been working in recent years training the future generation of James Wans and Gillian Armstrongs as Emeritus Professor of Screen and Creative Arts at Macquarie University.
For Millard's 1990 documentary feature film Light Years (screens Saturday, October 21 at 4.15pm) she trained her camera on Olive Cotton, an Australian figure more comfortable behind her own camera.
Cotton worked with iconic photographer Max Dupain in the 1930s and '40s in Sydney and when Millard interviewed her for Light Years, she had only recently again begun exhibiting her decades of work to much acclaim.
Millard will be joined onstage by National Gallery of Australia Senior Curator of Photography Shane Lakin for a discussion about Cotton's work following the screening.
Both Millard's Light Years and her 2009 documentary The Boot Cake (Sunday, October 22, 1.30pm) on the impact of silent cinema across the globe, have been digitally remastered.
The 2023 opening night feature is Remember the Night (Friday October 20, 7.30pm), a 1940 comedy featuring a screenplay by Preston Sturges and lead performances from Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray.
Remember The Night is one of four films curated by Pike to explore Depression-era Hollywood storytelling at the hands of Mitchell Leisen, a comedic exploration of the haves and have-nots not too removed from the subject of much current-day filmmaking.
In the 1937 screwball comedy Easy Living (Saturday, October 21, 1.30pm), Jean Arthur plays a stenographer on the hustle to keep a roof over her head when a mink coat falls at her feet, hurled in a marital spat from a nearby penthouse apartment, and changes her life.
Meanwhile, a nice garment separating a woman from possible poverty is also the theme of the comedy Midnight (Saturday, October 21, 7.30pm), which Leisen directed from a Charles Brackett-Billy Wilder screenplay.
Fans of the Coen Brothers who enjoyed their 2000 comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou? will be excited at the opportunity to catch the 1941 Sullivan's Travels (Sunday, October 22, 4pm) being the Coens' inspiration for their George Clooney starrer. Sullivan's Travels was written and directed by Preston Sturges, and features the charismatic pairing of Joel McCrea and screen siren Veronica Lake. McCrea plays a Hollywood director who goes "method" (years before that became a thing), going undercover as a hobo to research the poverty he wants to explore in his imagined feature film called O Brother, Where Art Thou?.
Tickets for the 2023 Canberra International Film Festival (adult tickets $20, six-film festival pass $75) are available at ciff.com.au. Friday, October 20 to Sunday, October 22, 2023.
