BAIT 3D
Writer/Director Russell Mulcahy
Synopsis: When a massive tsunami hits the Australian coastline, a pack of tiger sharks threaten survivors trapped inside a flooded supermarket.

BLAME
Writer/Director Michael Henry
Synopsis: A group of young vigilantes seeking revenge for a sexual betrayal fall far from grace. When the truth is out they find themselves on the dark side of justice.

BURNING MAN
Writer/Director Jonathan Teplitzky
Synopsis: The reckless, romantic, irreverent and ultimately tear-jerkingly beautiful story of a father and son’s struggle to deal with the unimaginable.

RED HILL
Writer/Director/Producer Patrick Hughes
Synopsis: A young Melbourne police officer relocates to the small high-country town of Red Hill with his pregnant wife. When news of a prison break in Melbourne sends the local law enforcement officers into a panic, his first day on duty turns nightmarish. A modern take on the ‘revenge-Western’.

These all look to have commercial appeal, apart from Burning Man whose outline is too vague to judge.

I think Screen Australia is starting to take its critics seriously.

I actually think there are a few interesting sounding films on this list. There are also some films that from the synopsis are the kind of films I’d avoid like the plague, those bleak, kitchen sink human dramas that we continue to make again and again, despite the lack of audience interest.

A HEARTBEAT AWAY
Sales and Distribution Hoyts (Aus/NZ) and Lightning Entertainment (ROW)
Synopsis Kevin Flack – is obsessed with becoming a rock guitar legend – when his father is hit by a bus just four weeks before a major competition Kevin is forced to become the musical director of his fathers Brass band. Without his father’s knowledge Kevin decides to give the band a Rock & Roll make over.

BEING DEAD
Synopsis A haunting and tender account of a married couple found murdered in the dunes; how they got there, and what happens before they’re found. Being Dead explores themes of love and family, life and death, how we live our lives and what we leave behind.

I LOVE YOU TOO
Sales and Distribution Roadshow Films
Synopsis I Love You Too is a romantic comedy about a commitment-phobic man-about-town and a gifted new age dwarf who go on a quest to win back the women they love.

LOU
Big and Little Films
Sales and Distribution Kojo (Aust/NZ) and Bankside (ROW)
Synopsis A young girl finds love through a dangerous game with her Alzheimic grandfather.

LUV SUX
Sales and Distribution Arkles (Aust/NZ) and Odins Eye (ROW)
Synopsis At 17, Matt is a bit concerned about his future. So are his parents. Both are loving, caring individuals who only want the best for their son. But only one is human. The other is a five hundred year old vampire.

GRIFF THE INVISIBLE
Everyday Pictures
Synopsis Griff is a super hero. But no one knows. Because it’s a secret.

THE PLACE BETWEEN
Scarlett Pictures Pty Ltd
Synopsis When Karen Burden is released from jail after three years, she quickly discovers that between guilt and forgiveness is the place between.

These ‘innovative’ features are but a few of what Screen Australia decided to fund on the 17th of December 2008. Don’t believe me? – see for yourself: http://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/industry_support/approvals_latest_feat.asp

In 2009 over 30 feature films received funding, of those only one ‘Samson and Delilah’, broke even. The rest lost millions of tax payer’s dollars. Even ‘Mao’s Last Dancer’ ( which cost 28million dollars to make) is still 13 million dollars in the red!

God help us all!

The facets are these:

NEPOTISM i.e. it’s not what you know, but who. How else can you explain how so many irresponsible funding decisions get made?

LACK OF ACCOUNTABILITY. If accountability were part of the equation, then nepotism would be made difficult and scripts and projects assessed on the basis of their MERITS alone. Assessors would then have to show cause as to why some projects and scripts are receiving funding and others are not, as well as their viability in the marketplace.

WRITER/DIRECTOR. Clearly, SCREEN Australia has a preference for writer/directors, many of whom, I know from experience, have little or no scriptwriting experience whatsoever. Many employ scriptwriting agencies to expand and develop their treatments and synopsis, which are often very poorly written and passed off as their own. Of course there are rare exceptions to this.

GAGGING NEW TALENT. The way Screen Australia is set up at the moment, deliberately EXCLUDES the introduction of new and developing talent, especially scriptwriters.

Perhaps some concerned journalist would like to explore these facets in detail. I’m sure they’d make a very interesting and informative article. It’s not as if the proof ain’t out there…

Films in search of an audience- Michael Bodey

The snubbing of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia by AFI Awards voters didn’t surprise anyone. After all, of the 10 highest grossing Australian films, only three have been nominated for best film and not one has won.
Indeed, numerous producers have previously bypassed the AFI Awards by not entering their films, including Crocodile Dundee and Babe. Why let your local peers insult you with a slap when the global stage beckons?

Consequently, the Australian Film Institute has recently introduced the box office achievement award. It is a make-good that only draws attention to a glaring problem for the local film industry: in essence, it recognises the film that Australians liked but at which the industry sniffs.

In broader terms it only highlights the inability of the Australian film industry to relate to its audience or the broader socio-political environment.

Luhrmann’s film, which will win the box office achievement award by $20 million or so, received five AFI nominations, for sound, original score, production and costume design and for supporting actor Brandon Walters.
But the shunning of Mandy Walker’s cinematography, for instance, a year after the Film Critics Circle of Australia adjudged it the best of last year, is gobsmacking. Australia clearly wasn’t judged on its merits. Or its merits were obscured by the thought the film’s budget was $100m more than the next biggest budget (Mao’s Last Dancer’s $25m).

Luhrmann doesn’t seem bothered. As he noted at last month’s IF Awards in Sydney, the audience loved it. He makes films for them. But one year on from the release of Australia, which earned $37m here, the silence surrounding the film remains astounding. The second highest grossing film in Australian history appears to be the Australian film industry’s shameful secret.

There have not been media discussions about its commercial success beyond the first month of Australia bashing after its release late last year. The West Australian’s Mark Naglazas was typical, writing in November 2008 that it was “a film of such unrelenting awfulness that it will struggle to return its massive budget”.

Many even revelled in the film’s failure at the US box office, although it has since sold more than 1.7 million DVDs in the US and earned more than $US200m ($220m) in global cinemas.

Of course, popular success doesn’t always equate with quality but it is a rather potent measure of merit, whether you like it or not.

Yet Australia baiting remains the laziest of film journalism sports. Last week, The Age’s Jake Wilson wrote: “The virtual absence of [AFI] nominations for Baz Luhrmann’s Australia suggests that this epic fiasco has already been deservedly forgotten.”

Should it be forgotten or should wiser heads be asking why it worked? Given its box office and DVD sales here, it is reasonable to suggest Australia has been seen by more than five million Australians. Yet the film is blithely dismissed in the media as a debacle.

“It seems to me that Baz is a victim of people falling in love [with him], he can do no wrong, everything’s fantastic and for the very same reasons they all love him, they all start to hate him,” says Jane Campion. “But he persists and isn’t he amazing, he’s lasted.”

Sections of the media and the public came to despise the film after Twentieth Century Fox’s relentless marketing campaign. Certainly Australian exhibitors were concerned the public had been turned off the film and rival distributors still believe Fox manufactured a media embargo that was broken only by positive reviews in News Corporation newspapers (er, not here).

But the film industry’s own reluctance to cite the film as an achievement is disturbing.

It’s reminiscent of the film industry’s skittishness when Working Dog’s debut film, The Castle, became such a box office hit and cultural phenomenon. Or The Wog Boy. They didn’t win film festival awards in Europe. While no one needs to defend Australia as perfect, no one in the industry even discusses the film as a casestudy of what the industry could be.

At last month’s Screen Producers Association of Australia conference in Sydney, one session explored the making of the film’s tie-in with Tourism Australia, but no one assessed the making of the film, its marketing or its appeal.

SPAA president Anthony Ginnane spoke of the film as a footnote. “Perhaps collectively our ability to read the marketplace and audience appetite has been so dulled by the subsidy drug that we have completely forgotten what audiences want,” he said.

“Mao’s Last Dancer, with a fantastic Australian gross of $13,975,651 to date, like Australia, proves that melodrama, not social realism, is the genre our would-be screenwriters should be studying.”

It is unlikely Australian screenwriters will study Luhrmann’s film.

Australia’s year out of the spotlight is a stark reminder of the disconnection between the film industry, and to a lesser extent the media, and its audience.

There have been many other reminders this year. The creative community has failed to engage the broader community on the issues of social inequality raised in Samson and Delilah.

In his defence, director Warwick Thornton is not a polemicist. But surely others might have leveraged the indigenous film for greater good?

Other examples of the film industry’s blithe ignorance, or even contempt, of the society around them abound.

At the IF Awards, Mary and Max producer Melanie Coombs noted with some joy that more people had seen Adam Elliot’s animated film in France than in its homeland, as if that vindicated the film.

This year, Beautiful Kate director Rachel Ward wrote an opinion piece in The Sydney Morning Herald lamenting that not enough Australians embraced her little film and that such films should be protected and loved. She didn’t address the notion that word-of-mouth for a film that implicitly accepts incest among teens would not be strong.

Like so many Australian films, Beautiful Kate hung on a couple of wonderful performances, including a cracker from Bryan Brown, and cute cinematography. Ward should take her $1.6m box office and run.

And as far back as last year’s AFI Awards, The Black Balloon’s director Elissa Down and co-screenwriter “Jimmy The Exploder” whined while accepting their awards that a Melbourne journalist didn’t like their film. That The Black Balloon would not win one AFI award if it was up against this year’s competition makes the outburst look even more childish.

After many years covering the Australian film industry, I’m resigned to hearing about financing models gone awry and from creatives complaining the system doesn’t work or people shouldn’t knock them. These cries have been constant since the late 1970s. The problems are the same, only the names and subsidies change.

I fear the struggle will forever be a problem for an industry fighting for space against the cultural behemoth, Hollywood. We’ll have our little wins but it will be a never-ending battle. But we should revel in every win, not play favourites.

My real fear about the Australian film industry is that many of the wrong people are in the battle; people who feel entitled, protected and above criticism. People who whine when things don’t fall their way and blame others when their own work doesn’t succeed. People who don’t have a clue about the world in which they live and the people to whom they’re trying to tell stories.

I’d go so far as to say people who inhabit the TV and radio industries are far more dynamic, progressive and engaged. Which is not to dismiss an entire film industry, just large parts of it.

A week before the release of one local film, I asked its director if he was nervous. After years developing and making the film, one week before it hit cinemas he was asking himself for the first time, who would want to see his film? He’d made a film without considering his audience. Some auteurs can get away with that. Probably 10 to 20 globally.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard such myopia from an Australian director. Fortunately, a couple of months later another director, David Caesar, told me how privileged he felt every time someone allowed him to make a movie. He felt great responsibility to those providing the money and to an audience. Not enough Australian filmmakers do.

Even worse, the Australian film industry doesn’t always acknowledge those who deliver on that responsibility.

AUSTRALIAN film makers are making too many costly box office flops using taxpayer handouts, a leading industry figure claims.

The stinging attack comes as the industry’s leading lights assemble in Melbourne for tomorrow’s Australian Film Institute awards.

Screen Producers Association of Australia president Antony Ginnane warned Aussie flicks were putting off audiences and threatening the local trade’s future.

“The whole industry needs to look at itself. It won’t be sustainable … until it considers what audiences want to see,” the 38-year veteran of global film and TV said.

“We need to move away from films that are depressing and unpleasant, and give audiences something it is worth spending $17 on for a ticket – plus parking and a babysitter.

“Audiences want to see movies that take them out of themselves, that are magical and exciting … not ones that are dark, depressing and way too much like reality.”

Mr Ginnane said surprise hit Samson and Delilah – a love story about two young petrol sniffers – was proof films could be bleak and still succeed.

He praised the Cannes festival winner for its low $1.6 million budget.

It has earned $3.2 million at the box office – and will make more from DVD sales and rentals, and sales to pay and free TV stations.

“But when you make something for $8 million and it only does $200,000, that’s not the right result,” he said.

A Herald Sun analysis of recent releases found almost all have lost money, despite generous government backing.

Of the six AFI Best Film nominees, only Samson and Delilah is close to returning a profit despite more than $17 million in federal and state backing.

The highly acclaimed Mao’s Last Dancer cost $26 million to make – including at least $4 million of taxpayer grants.

Despite being considered a box office success, it has so far taken just $15 million.

Critically acclaimed Blessed cost $4 million to make, but movie-goers have handed over just $455,000 to see it.

Prime Mover – the tale of a love triangle between a woman, a man and his truck received $1.4 million of government money – but has taken only $52,000 in the six weeks since it opened.

Thriller Coffin Rock also fell stone dead, taking $31,000 at the box office after taxpayers poured in about $850,000.

Screen Australia chief Ruth Harley defended the industry, declaring this year “the most successful year for Australian films in a decade”.

She said the local films’ share of the overall Australian box office was likely to exceed 5 per cent, well up on previous years.

She said success was about more than just making money. “Some films disappoint, and others succeed,” she said.

“Most of them won’t make money. That’s the reason we subsidise the arts. So we get to tell our own stories.

“Diversity is very important. It’s important to make big films, little films, films for particular audiences.

“I think it’s very important that a whole range of films get funding.” Ms Harley said it was also important to support emerging talent so they could go on to bigger things. ( Hartley=supid bitch! Screen Australia BLOCKS emerging talent )

Many canny movie makers apply for federal and state cash for their flicks.

Blessed, for example, collected $500,000 from Film Victoria, Mary and Max got $525,000, and Balibo $400,000 – all in addition to substantial federal contributions.

Film Victoria spokeswoman Cara Sputore said State Government backing hinged on movie makers proving a distributor had decided the film had audience appeal and was willing to roll it out.

“It’s explicit in our guidelines that we will contribute funding to films only if a distributor has signed on to release the movie,” she said.

Victorian Innovation Minister Gavin Jennings also defended government subsidies for local films.

The Government was proud to support the film industry but was conscious of the need to support movies attractive to wide audiences.

“It is important that Australians have the chance to see their own stories on screen,” he said.

I couldn’t agree more.

‘I set out to watch most of the Australian films released this year because I wanted to grasp the condition of our industry. On a practical level, it was often hard to find these films; they seldom stayed in the cinema long enough. I became used to tracking them to small independent cinemas that, judging by the tiny crowds, seemed to be showing them as a national duty. Occasionally, I had to use connections to scrounge up a bootleg DVD.

Most of the 2009 films had brief runs and only one – the very low-budget Samson and Delilah – has so far made back its money. Bruce Beresford’s Mao’s Last Dancer has made the most money and is now inching towards the $12 million mark. Most of the rest have failed badly. The output in 2009 has been enormous (over 30 and counting), but the commercial success rate has been dismal.

Watching these films has been an unusual experience for me. Never before have I found myself so immersed in an art form that made me question just what it is to be Australian, prompting me to ask of these films – do they really reflect our culture? While watching practically every movie, I found myself wondering why we tell our stories the way we do. There were also moments when I pondered just how the damn film got made, and why. Sometimes the only thing that stopped me from walking out was a fascination akin to the morbid curiosity that makes people slow down to look at car accidents…’