Adelaide Film Festival to get physical

As South Australia gets on top of Covid, a full season of cinema is underway, screening across a range of city and suburban movie houses.

Writer/director Seth Larney, actor Tilda Cobham-Hervey and Adelaide Film Festival director Mat Kesting. Picture: Roy Van Der Vegt

About six months ago — at the height of the coronavirus lockdown — there were five different contingency plans for staging this year’s Adelaide Film Festival, ranging from the exciting to the unusual to the completely miserable.

There was a plan to screen all the movies online, a hybrid online and physical model with limited audiences, a drive-in movie theatre model where audiences would be confined to their cars, a fully physical festival using an increased number of cinemas to accommodate social distancing, and the most defeatist option was to raise the white flag, cancel the thing and move it to 2021.

With South Australia getting on top of COVID-19, festival director Mat Kesting says it was a huge relief that option four prevailed, with a full season of cinema starting last week across a range of city and suburban movie houses, giving the socially distanced crowds the maximum chance to catch the flick of their choice.

And now, cinema-starved movie fans have flocked back and filled theatres across Adelaide as Australia’s first “physical” film festival of 2020 is set to break pre-coronavirus box office records.

With SA’s borders now open to every state but Victoria, the festival has also attracted name directors and actors to attend 10 world premieres and 30 Australia premieres.

“It has been such a thrill to be able to honour films and filmmakers by screening these movies inside cinemas the way they were intended to be enjoyed,” Mr Kesting said.

“The crowds have just been lapping it up. We have been putting on extra sessions and we couldn’t be happier with the attendances. To top the 2018 box office will be amazing. It just shows how much hunger there has been from film-lovers who spent much of the year crawling up the walls wanting to get back to the movies.”

The atmosphere at the festival’s hub at the East End Palace Nova cinema complex is one of giggly excitement as so many interstaters arrive in a city that has none of the harsher restrictions that are still in place elsewhere.

Director Seth Larney, whose sci-fi thriller 2067 premiered at the festival, made it over from Sydney, as did Adelaide-born, Los Angeles-based actor Tilda Cobham-Hervey whose role in the Helen Reddy biopic I Am Woman was rendered sadly poignant by the singer’s death last month.

“It is wonderful being back home in cruisy Adelaide and staying with my Mum and Dad,” Cobham-Hervey said. “It is pretty different from life in Los Angeles and so good seeing people in the cinemas again.”