Melbourne Women in Film Festival

Dr Sian Mitchell is a film critic, writer and academic at SAE Creative Media Institute, and the festival director of the Melbourne Women in Film Festival, now in its second year.

Milk Bar Mag was lucky enough to speak with Sian about the origins of the festival, and why a festival for female filmmakers is more important than ever.

Coming from academia, was there any particular impetus for you to start this festival?

Yes — it was my students. I teach within a film production course and have a lot of students who are women, who want to get into the industry, and when I sort of probe them [about] who their role models are, or just general discussions around filmmakers, none of them really know local women who are doing what they want to do.

There’s an exercise that I do in one of my classes where I give my students a handout and [ask them to] write down as many Australian women filmmakers that you can name. And I do that with Indigenous filmmakers as well … and they get so stuck, because if it’s not American and male, then they don’t know that much really.

So that was part of it — I’ve always been interested in women’s filmmaking generally and [wanted] to put something together that hopefully helps [people]  discover that there are women out there.

Has the post-Harvey Weinstein, #metoo, cultural climate impacted on you and the work that you’re doing?

It’s definitely found its way into our team discussions. I think that it will probably have more of an impact on perhaps how we program our next festival. We do have an objective to always try to engage with discussions around equality within the industry, so it might end up finding its way into panel discussions or potentially the [films] that we want to program.

For me, this whole post-Weinstein thing has just heightened what we already want to achieve. It’s a real justification for having a festival of women’s storytelling perspectives … I think it’s really important to showcase that there are those voices out there.

So I think if … festivals like ours’ can keep on trying to spotlight [women filmmakers] then maybe it will become more of the norm that we see … more women’s filmmaking in perhaps largely arenas like mainstream cinemas.

I’m wondering on the back of that if there’s any particular up-and-coming women working in film that you’re personally excited about?

I’m really excited about a filmmaker called Amie Batalibasi — we screened her film in our program last year called Lift. In this program, we’ve got a film of hers’ called Blackbird, in the short film section. She’s a Solomon Islander filmmaker — I find her really, really interesting, and Blackbird, in particular, is just beautifully shot.

There’s a couple of short films that I think are really beautiful — there’s one called Dance Card, which is a very simple sort of story about a young woman coming out to her grandfather. That was made by a filmmaker called Renee Crea.

Natalie Erika James — we’re playing one of her short films called Creswick — and she’s been the recipient of the last Film Victoria funded director’s attachment [on Leigh Whannell’s sci-fi thriller, STEM] which is a highly competitive initiative. She’s another one that I would probably keep an eye on.

One of our feature films is made by a local, Victorian filmmaker called Sophie Townsend, called Pretty Good Friends. It’s very independent, because one of the bigger themes that we’re going with for this festival is independence, the ‘indie’ kind of thing, low-budget.

The last person would be Sophie Mathieson.  She made a feature film Drama — I think it came out of her Master’s degree that she was doing in London — and she crowdfunded the entire thing. You wouldn’t [know]  — the production value is fantastic on it. So we’re playing that for our closing night film.

What are you most excited for people to experience at this year’s MWFF?

That is hard, because I’d like to think all of it is great. It depends on what people are interested in. Opening night [Love Serenade screening, followed by a ‘Love Songs and Dedications’ after-party] is going to be really fun. There’s another session called Music and Motion that we’ve put together at Hoyts, which should be a really fun session, while also at the same time looking back at some older films. Rachel Perkins’ One Night the Moon (2001) is one of them, which we’re playing alongside some contemporary films – all music-based.

If it’s that kind of interesting, different, fun screening that you want to attend, then those two would be good.

If it’s more around looking at issues to do with gender equality, and things that we’ve been talking about, or young filmmakers figuring out how to make a film, then I suggest the panels and forums that we’re doing, [which] is something that’s more information-based and discussion-based.

The short film sessions too though are great! [laughs] I guess if you’re wanting a little bit of everything, we’ve tried to make as diverse as we could in terms of what we received. There’s some really funny stuff, there’s some really serious stuff; there’s a bit of genre stuff … there’s some documentaries, and some animations, so there’s quite a mix.

So if you can’t make up your mind, the short films are the way to go.

Melbourne Women in Film Festival 
Thursday, 22 to Sunday, 25 February 2018
mwff.org.au