Busselton is a small seaside town three hours south of Perth, right in the heart of wine country. Technically, it’s a city, but its residents can’t mention this without laughing at the absurdity of the fact. Outside the summer tourist season, it’s a quiet place – the cafés close at 4pm on a Saturday and most of the bars don’t seem to open at all. Today, though, the roads are packed and there’s a traffic jam stretching out of town.
The reason for the tailbacks becomes clear upon reaching the Orana cinema in the town centre. Children and their parents spill out across the road and discarded paper aeroplanes cover the pavement. The reason for the fuss is a screening of Paper Planes, a new children’s film by Robert Connolly, the director of Balibo and producer of The Turning.
Paper Planes is one of six Australian contenders competing for the inaugural $100,000 CinéfestOz prize, the richest prize in Australian cinema, well ahead of Sydney’s $61,000. The prize is also the only award guaranteed to go to a new Australian film.
CinéfestOz has grown from selling 1,900 tickets in its first year to 12,400 in 2013. Chief executive Malinda Nixon says she expects an even higher number in 2014, around 19,000. Of those sales, she estimates 10% are to film industry visitors, with the remaining 90% split evenly between locals and visitors from outside the Margaret River region.
It’s clear that the main aims of the festival are commercial. From the banners advertising “Great films! Great food! Great wine!” to a nakedly populist film schedule much heavier on action movies and children’s films than an ordinary festival, the whole experience is sold as a destination event. The focus is on the experience rather than the actual films – there are links with vineyards and tie-ins with restaurants, and all of the screenings get the glitzy red-carpet treatment.
There’s certainly an appetite for it. In a region normally starved of anything beyond the major-studio slate, the audiences lap up the industry speakers and sidebars and dress up for the evening events at venues across the region.
This year, though, that enormous $100,000 prize has added a significant amount of prestige to the event, with organisers hoping it will become the film equivalent of literature’s Miles Franklin prize or portraiture’s Archibald.
Guaranteed for three years, it’s funded by a program called Royalties for Regions, an arrangement under which 25% of Western Australia’s mining and petroleum royalty payments are set aside for development of the state’s rural areas. Under this arrangement, WA supports ScreenWest, who in turn give funding to CinéfestOz, which brings tourism money to the region.
It’s clearly working for Western Australia, but is it good for Australian film?
Actor Joel Edgerton, writer, producer and star of prize nominee Felony, is optimistic that the enormous prize on offer at CinéfestOz will trickle down and be good for the nation’s film industry. “This film prize really electrifies things, but I imagine that whoever is the recipient will probably either dig into their pockets in retrospect to thank the people that worked very hard for no money … or that money will go into a movie that you’ll see here next year or the year after”
Other industry figures attending the event are also positive about the democratisation of film in Australia. Robert Connolly thinks the enthusiasm shown by locals for CinéfestOz mirrors a trend in the way people consume culture.
“The festivalification of the arts is really interesting,” Connolly says. “Films that might have got a boutique theatrical release are just playing the festival circuit to packed audiences and really obscure, tough cinema at a festival sells out. But if it was in a theatrical release, people wouldn’t go. So what the festival does is give the night out some other kind of value.”
At a time when film and TV on-demand allows audiences to watch anything anytime, cinema still has a role to play in gathering people together. “To get people to go out, you need to make it an event. And how do you make it an event? You put it within a festival framework. People don’t just look at what’s on and think, ‘Oh, I’ll go and see that’ – we’re past that.”
Connolly also believes the rising popularity of events like CinéfestOz and Melbourne international film festival is indicative of modern cinemagoing culture in Australia.
“At Melbourne, when it gets to the last week of the festival, a sort of panic sets in among people who haven’t seen films yet, and all the screenings sell out. The most obscure films are packed, because people want to be a part of the festival experience. People love to go out and do stuff. This idea that it’s going to die, it’s just not true.”
Despite recent cuts to arts funding in the budget, director Bruce Beresford, chairman of the 2014 festival jury, also sees a rosy future for Australian film and CinéfestOz.
“Festivals like this one which publicise Australian films and bring them to the public are crucial in keeping the whole thing going,” he says.
“But I’m not worried. When I was a child I asked my father, ‘Why don’t we make films in Australia?’ And he said ‘They make them overseas, and we watch them.’ Well, now we do. We make a lot of films, and television, and it’s had ups and downs but … there’s 23m Australians who want to see our own country and culture on television and in the cinema.”
And it won’t stop, Beresford says. “It’ll have ups and downs, it’ll have difficult periods, there’ll be good films, bad films, but it’ll never stop. There will always be a neverending stream of talented men and women. I see as many new Australian films as I can, and I’m very optimistic.”
After the screening of Paper Planes, a lively audience file out of the cinema and head across the road to the marquee for a boisterous paper plane flying contest, judged by Connolly himself. Later that evening, the producers of the film take home the $100,000 award to almost universal approval.
If the enthusiastic response afforded to the film is anything to go by, a new generation of Australian filmmakers have been inspired. Bruce Beresford may have nothing to worry about.
