Premieres line up to dominate Melbourne film festival

The Melbourne International Film Festival has released this year’s program and, as always, wading through it is a daunting task.

Mistress America will screen at the Melbourne festival.

The Melbourne International Film Festival has released this year’s program and, as always, wading through it is a daunting task. The festival will feature several premieres of Australian works, including Lawrence Leung’s semi-autobiographical drama Sucker, directed by Ben Chessell and starring Kat Stewart and Shaun Micallef; Pawno,Paul Ireland’s Footscray drama starring John Brumpton and Maeve Darmody; Brodie Higgs’s German-Australian drama Elixir;Grant Scicluna’s Downriver, starring Robert Taylor and Kerry Fox; Lawrence Johnston’s Neon; Michael Rowe’s follow-up to his award-winning Leap Year, the Canadian co-production Early Winter; Simon Stone’s The Daughter; and Neil Armfield’s Holding the Man. Kriv Stenders’s coming drama for SBS One, The Principal, starring Alex Dimitriades, will also be screened. MIFF will feature retrospectives of works by Chilean Sebastian Silva (The Maid), New York indie stars Josh and Benny Safdie,and David Gulpilil. The festival will close with Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America. Several programming streams return, including Next Gen, Backbeat, Accent on Asia, Culinary Cinema and This Sporting Life, and a True Crime on Film strand will feature new films by Nick Broomfield and Amy Berg. Gaspar Noe’s contentious Love and Takashi Miike’s Yakuza Apocalypse headline the Night Shift stream while Masters & Restorations include Kinji Fukusaku’s 1973 film Battle Without Love and Honour, Howard Brookner’s 1983 film Burroughs: The Movie and My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, which was filmed by his partner Liv Corfixen during the mad production of Only God Forgives. Adrian Wootton returns with his acclaimed Illustrated Film Talks, and new films in the International Panorama section include works by Guy Maddin (The Forbidden Room), Pablo Larrain (The Club), Robert Guediguan (Don’t Tell Me The Boy Was Mad), Abel Ferrara (Pasolini), Cannes hit The Lobster, and Sydney Film Prize winner Arabian Nights. The MIFF runs July 30 to August 16.

Federal agency Screen Australia has appointed strategic agency For the People to work on developing a communications and PR campaign to “build pride in Australian film”. The agency, through Screen Australia, hasn’t begun well by asking, through Screen Australia, to sit down with several industry people, including this rube, to “get your insights as we kick this off”. Reel Time is all for fresh eyes and the agency’s mantra “for shaking things up” and “disrupting industries” with an inspiration that “comes more from Silicon Valley than management and design textbooks” — if we were to parody a digital start-up. And Reel Time is all for the “common sense and brutal honesty” the agency spouts, so here’s some, and I believe I can speak for others who’ve been approached: if you can’t work it out yourself, pay a professional. Until then, don’t insult the professionals by trying to lift their ideas.

Vale Geoff Brown, the former executive director of Screen Producers Association of Australia, who died on Monday after a long illness, aged 66. Geoff was a favourite of Reel Time, a strong and realistic advocate for his industry, always good for an insightful chat, good laugh or not so quiet drink. He was head of the industry lobby group representing producers, SPAA, for 10 years, and with the organisation for 16 years. In that time, SPAA’s arguably greatest result, and in concert with others, was the 2007 overhaul of federal financing of Australian film with an offset system that has generated consistency and certainty in a sector always wobbling due to external influences. He was out front and it is some legacy. Before SPAA, Brown was a senior executive at the ABC for more than a decade. He is survived by son Nick and he will be greatly missed. The “SPAA conference” won’t be the same without his laconic style and dry wit.

Neil Peplow, the chief of the London-based Met Film School, will replace Sandra Levy as chief executive of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. He was the director of screen at AFTRS from 2011 before moving to London last year. Levy retired from the position last week after eight years in the role. Acting Arts Minister Warren Truss says: “With his strong skills and experience in screen educational institutions, as well as proven screen production expertise, Mr Peplow will be an invaluable addition to the team at AFTRS.” Ann Browne, AFTRS’ director of corporate services and its COO , will continue as acting chief until Peplow begins in September.

School holiday audiences kept Minions and Inside Out rolling strongly but Terminator: Genisys topped them both, just, in its opening week. The fifth Terminator film opened with $4.7 million ahead of Minions $4.6m (up to $20m in total now) and Inside Out’s $4.4m ($17m). Jurassic World slowed, a little, with $3.6m pushing it to $44m. It looks as if it may become only the sixth film to earn $50m in the Australian market. Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy, about Brit soul star Amy Winehouse, opened with the second best screen average of the weekend, earning $174,000 on 17 screens.