Greg Dolgopolov

Special section: Inside looking out – film festival reports

Look about. From big cities to rural centres, tourist towns to sheep farms, film festivals are everywhere. Hardly a weekend now passes without some celebration lighting up screens somewhere around ...

Distribution and film festivals: Editorial introduction

A year on from our first instalment of the special issue exploring film distribution and film festivals in Australasia, the state of the local film industry, within Australia at least, seems to have shifted. After a long drought, in 2015 Australian films seemingly found their audience. That crisis of distribution, which shaped our introduction to this topic back in issue 9.1, momentarily eased with a large slate of locally made films finding their way to a range of screens around the country. From the blockbuster heights ofMadMax Fury Road to the romantic Australiana of The Dressmaker, Blinky Bill The Movie and The Water Diviner, traversing the road movie suicide drama Last Cab to Darwin to the biggest non-IMAX doco, That Sugar Film and the emerging new focus of family-friendly hits based on the success of Paper Planes and Oddball, 2015 was a bumper year. What’s more, with these films appearing in a range of cinemas, audiences were finally convinced to spend their dollars on viewing something locally made with

Introductory essay: distribution

84 million expended on local fare. Reports claim that Australian films had achieved an impressive 7.7% share of the national box office by the end of the 2015 (Hawker 2016). While Gardner (2016) warns against the hyperbole of statistics and impressive looking figures released alongside the 2015 successes, there is no denying that over the last year Australian films have managed to gain the attention and perhaps win back a little of the trust of domestic audiences. These gains were in the context of minimal structural changes in the distribution process. The theatrical distribution market has become so competitive that even relatively commercially orientated projects such as Kill Me Three Times and Strangerland have been released on video-on-demand as the primary release platform, after short festival seasons, highlighting distributor’s wariness. Yet, while the successes and interest generated through 2015 might paint a rosier picture compared to this time last year, the reality of the Australian industry and the state of existing distribution strategies for locally made films are still in turmoil. Already new Federal Government funding cuts to Screen Australia set for 2016 threaten to undermine some of the progresses made. While the fact that local films found a willing audience in 2015 offers no guarantees that these audiences will return in 2016 or beyond. The technological changes affecting all aspects of the cinema trade and film industry continue to disrupt established business models and new avenues and ways of thinking about film production, circulation and modes of consumption are still required to ensure the relevance and visibility of Australasian productions into the future. This third instalment of our special issue on Distribution and Film Festivals continues the themes and challenges raised in our earlier issues. Looking at both present and past, it explores the history and continuation of distribution strategies and film festival operation

The Petrov Affair: An ambivalent migrant narrative

Australian film distribution is in permanent crisis. While rates of Australian film production remains consistent, Australian films distributed theatrically do not appear to connect with audiences. Even well-reviewed Australian films with international stars, slick ad campaigns and solid genre formats are meeting box office obliteration. And yet, Australian stories are still being watched by Australian audiences – only now predominantly not in cinemas but in a variety of different formats. Australian films perform strongly in traditional ancillary markets and their share of new Video on Demand (VOD) and Electronic Sell Through (EST) markets is growing steadily, but these markets and alternative distribution channels do not attract the attention they deserve. Digitalisation is wrenching apart the foundations upon which the global film industry is based and cinema now circulates abundantly outside its canonical site, the cinema. Although the implications of these transformations for audiences, industry professionals, policy-makers and scholars are surfacing, what is less popularly understood is that the tumultuous changes underway in the film industry are in fact largely changes in film distribution – the ways in which films reach their viewers, in and outside the motion picture theatre. This realisation is also becoming better understood within the Australian context. Many of the problems facing Australian national cinema are coming to be understood as problems of distribution: the discussion of theatrical film distribution’s crisis steadily trickling down from industry and scholarly circles into the public sphere. This edition of Studies in Australasian Cinema is devoted to exploring a range of new distribution opportunities from the benefits and failures of film festivals in supporting emerging film-makers, to individually orchestrated community screenings, to VOD and EST services. This issue comes in the months following the first major simultaneous, multi-platform release of a federally funded Australian film, The Mule which, at the time of publication, is showing promising signs for films willing to seek alternative paths to their audiences. As such, this distribution-themed issue is an effort to bridge industry and scholarly discussions, and to ask what is working for independent film-makers in the rising tide of disruption, disintermediation and convergence. If traditional film distribution is in crisis, the authors of this journal offer snapshots of the broader crisis, as well as the spot-fires of innovation that offer possible solutions for Australian film-makers and researchers. Deb Verhoeven, Alwyn Davidson and Bronwyn Coate offer us a provocative question: how should we best judge films’ commercial impact? Is the standard measure – the citation of box office figures – helpful or even accurate? It is a question Studies in Australasian Cinema, 2015 Vol. 9, No. 1, 3–6, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17503175.2014.1002268

Reeling in the beast: The anti-Russian, Russian 'Leviathan'

ABSTRACT Well after the end of the Culture Wars, the televisual representations of The Petrov Affair continue to flourish. ‘The Petrov Affair’ profoundly changed the Australian ideals of modernity and conception of Communism, political espionage and migration in the 1950s. The 1987 miniseries The Petrov Affair (Michael Carson) was released at the height of the 1980s promotion of multiculturalism and the historical miniseries boom. It is not a spy thriller, nor a courtroom drama about the Royal Commission. The Petrov Affair is a delicate character study of the difficulties of deciding to immigrate and the ambivalence that lies at the nexus between modernity and migration. This article seeks to rehabilitate this forgotten docudrama and examine the relationship between modernity, mobility and migration in the cultural production that explored emerging multicultural policies.