"The better you look, the more you see."
— Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama
After ten years I'm a little tired of criticizing the local industry for its stupidity. Why? To a large extent it feels pointless. The powers that be, on the whole, have not and will not listen to reasonable ideas for improvement or proposals for better funding decisions. Every year they fund 80% rubbish ... and you all know I'm being generous here.
There has been a slight move towards including more Australian genre
films in the funding decisions in recent years, which is a damn good thing. Examples are Animal Kingdom, Daybreakers, Patrick Hughes' Red Hill,
Jon Hewitt's X and Road Train – the latter premiering at MUFF XI. This is
a positive move, and I think MUFF can take credit for helping to foster this movement and encouraging a potential second Ozploitation Renaissance.
MUFF, though, has always been about much more than that. At least it has been to me. It might sound naïve, but I have always felt that a whole new cinema movement was being born here at MUFF and that I was smack bang in the middle of it. All the exciting filmmakers I saw in Australia wanted to make genre films or disturbing or transgressive art movies, most containing violence, sex, drugs, or extreme behaviour.
Beyond that I could see the new technologies of digital cinema achieving
more than a mere increase in vapid accessibility, so that every talentless
idiot could make a movie. No, I saw a new elite cinema vanguard being born!
A new generation of digital cinema artists who would perfect their craft making incredible new cinema on small budgets to fit these downsized movie-making times. I saw ten or twenty Inland Empires or Antichrists a year coming from Australia. I saw a movement as exciting as the French New Wave or British New Wave developing here in the back streets of our major cities with style, skill, wit and acumen.
So what of this dream? I think we are on our way, but we're not there yet.
Is this a delusional dream? It's hard to tell, but I think you can really begin to see thrilling bodies of work developing in the areas of filmmaking I described above, with many of the filmmakers reaching the heights for which I'm aiming.
MUFF XI is more than a hint of this dream, and this is what keeps us going in those dark nights of the soul. MUFF is here for your delectation and in a stripped back, leaner and meaner version. We have three great venues in
2010 including the Classic Cinema in Elsternwick, Shed4 at Docklands and 1000 £ Bend in the CBD. We have tried to come through venue-wise this year.
We have a wild selection of overseas and local narrative and documentary features and shorts in two larger than usual sections. Plus we have our special Bret Easton Ellis retrospective which provides our theme:
"The Surface of Things". For Ellis the superficial is all that matters.
There is nothing beyond the surface, no inner depths, no hidden meanings.
If you think about it this idea is paradoxically rather deep.
Canon has also been nice enough to come on board as the main MUFF sponsor and give us one of their excellent XL H1 cameras. We will award time of its use to MUFF winners and also allow its use within the MUFF family of filmmakers and inner circle. We aim to continue to bring and encourage the creation of exciting digital cinema. This move of MUFF into a production entity and project enabler is a good direction for us to go in, I believe. Thank you very much to Canon for enabling this to happen.
2010 has a been big year of change in my personal life. My father passed away just after last year's MUFF. And he was always a silent partner and helper with this festival when it was in need. I would like to dedicate this festival to my beloved father David William "Woofer" Wolstencroft. His loss is a terrible fracture in Being to me – the mournfulness of which words cannot describe.
I would also like to thank the many comrades who stand by me still, and have helped to fight this good fight over the years. While we may not have won the war, we have won a skirmish or two.
Our main point over the years: Australian cinema could be one of the best
Indy cinemas in the world. If only the powers controlling the purse strings were advised by the passionate, the creative and the innovative. After ten years I was invited to a private meeting last year about the state of our local film industry with Screen Australia. Let's hope we will see a bit more of that with myself and many other creative genre exponents and innovators.
MUFF has discovered and incubated more exciting new OZ filmmaking talent than MIFF and SIFF put together in the last ten years. Look at our screening discovery record and do the math, all you journalists who kiss MIFF's well-funded derriere but ignore its wild and innovative bastard cousin...
Support independent cinema in Australia by supporting MUFF! It's through your patronage and interest that we can keep this crazy circus going.
And that's exactly what we'd like to continue doing...
Best Regards
Richard Wolstencroft
MUFF Fest Director
