Adelaide Film Festival first in Australia to get bums back on seats in bricks and mortar cinemas — and SA films will be the star of the show
Adelaide’s biennial big screen celebration, the Adelaide Film Festival, is set to become the first in Australia - and among the first in the world - to get bums back on seats in cinemas this October.
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After months of uncertainty, the 2020 Adelaide Film Festival (AFF) in October is shaping up to be the first major film festival in Australia – and among the first in the world – to take place in cinemas.
Creative director Mat Kesting took over in February last year and would have liked one good festival behind him before facing down the COVID-19-related panic and uncertainty over the future of this year’s event.
“It’s been quite a challenge,” he laughs.
Last year was business as normal and Kesting attended the Venice Film Festival in late August and the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).
As programming manager of the AFF for four years prior, he was also a regular at the Cannes Film Festival but this year it, too, was a pandemic casualty, reduced to a scaled-down marketplace online event in late June which Kesting and his team watched closely.
Before the pandemic, the AFF schedule was to be a measured rollout of events, beginning in April with a pop-up showcasing the Helen Reddy biopic starring Adelaide’s Tilda Cobham-Hervey, I Am Woman – which was due in cinemas soon after – and the South Australia-filmed political thriller Escape from Pretoria, which stars Daniel Radcliffe. Both were pulled from release schedules and by April cinemas were closed.
The state’s enviable record in controlling the spread of the virus has tentatively brought us out the other side and the pop-up in altered form will go ahead this month, still with Escape from Pretoria but now accompanied by the black comedy Never Too Late – starring Jacki Weaver, Jack Thompson and UK actor Dennis Waterman – which also showcases recognisable Adelaide locations.
It will signal to interested audiences that the cinemas are back in business and that film is looking up.
One option in the deep, dark, early days of the pandemic was to cancel the festival altogether but it was an absolute last resort.
The AFF first turned its attention to the technology needed to mount a festival online. The Copenhagen CPH Docs festival pioneered technology developed in New Zealand which addressed the security risks of streaming, but no platform can fully eliminate the risk of someone videoing with an iPhone and posting it.
Next came the question of content.
The flow and rhythm of film programming was mightily disrupted and even TIFF this September – normally a good source of material for Adelaide because it is held a month ahead – has been dramatically curtailed.
Given the situation in South Australia, most of the activity will be in cinemas but the possibility of offering a hybrid combination is still there.
“We have been forced to develop so many configurations of the festival and to be poised to go whichever way we had to,” Kesting says.
It will inevitably be a very different event.
The 2018 AFF opening night was abuzz with the presence of Hollywood stars Dev Patel and Armie Hammer who, with Cobham-Hervey starred in the opening-night terrorist drama Hotel Mumbai.
This year there will be no Hollywood names and the focus has switched to Australian film.
I Am Woman will have its national premiere at the AFF, possibly as the opening night event, but Cobham-Hervey won’t be present given she lives in LA with Patel.
“I think there will be a strong Australian focus and that’s not really new; in fact the last program had about 49 per cent Australian content,” Kesting says. “I imagine we will maintain that with real people at real openings.”
Part of the weight of the AFF is the way it showcases to an international audience works commissioned by the AFF investment fund. This festival’s slate has been obviously affected by the industry shutdown but Kesting takes the long view and says this reserves good work for next time around, possibly in an off-year pop-up showing work that COVID delayed.
One investment fund inclusion is The Voice of Cycling, the story of international cycling commentator Phil Liggett, who has covered 44 Tours de France and 15 Olympic Games. The documentary was filmed during the 2019 Tour de France and this year’s Tour Down Under in Adelaide, and was made by the same Australian filmmakers behind MAMIL (Middle-Aged Men in Lycra), which featured Adelaide’s Fat Boys riders. The same filmmakers also made Remembering the Man, which won the 2015 AFF audience prize for documentary.
Some intriguing short films will also show, the product of AFF investment along with the South Australian Film Corporation and Panavision, including The Last Meal, which documents the final meal requests of US criminals on death row. “It’s an insight into so much – the script just leapt off the page and I have seen the first cuts and it has come together really well,” Kesting says.
The international program will probably suffer more than the Australian, with the availability of films pushing further and further out as the US and Europe fail to grapple decisively with the pandemic’s spread.
Cannes is always a key milestone and the AFF is tracking closely international features – which could include Mark Rylance, Johnny Depp and Robert Pattinson’s already acclaimed psychological thriller Waiting for the Barbarians, based on a book written by South African-born Adelaide Nobel prize-winning novelist John Coetzee.
“We always go for the best films that we can secure, and also films that push the form and push the medium,” Kesting says.
“We are also thinking about the audience and how they will be received and, of course, it depends on what the artists are making.”
The AFF pop up runs from July 11-12 at GU
Film House, Wallis Cinemas and Palace Nova. The AFF runs from October 14-25. See adelaidefilmfestival.org