Everyone has had the experience of walking into the wrong theatre at the cinemas. You’ve got your popcorn and take your seat. You’re filled with nervous excitement as you anticipate spending the next two hours engrossed in Pride and Prejudice. The curtains open and to your horror you find yourself confronted with an alien running a talon through a screaming scientist. You may have a similar experience at a number of film festivals where your expectations aren’t exactly met in, well, the way you expected.
The Bayside Film Festival in Victoria is a festival “by and for young people”, serving visual offerings of “local content in the context of international story-telling”. It’s surprising then, not to mention ironic, that on opening night audiences will watch a German documentary whose principle characters are between the ages of 80-100.
What relevance could it possibly hold for Australian youth?
The film is called Autumn Gold. It’s an Australian premiere that follows five elderly European athletes preparing to compete in the Track and Field World Championships.
“It’s a beautiful story…When I first saw it I went ‘Oh my god’ – I had to rewind it and play it again from the beginning. I was just mesmerised”, says Amadeo Marquez-Perez, artistic director of the Bayside Film Festival.
This years’ festival theme is ‘transitions’ as Marquez-Perez felt that the schools involved with the festival are going through a period of change. Autumn Gold fits the theme perfectly as it reverses the idea that life progresses from youth, to middle, to old age and instead shows a group of people who have "forgotten to age… someone forgot to tell them that at a certain age you stop, go to a retirement home and just wait. They have this incredible passion for life and for living and I just want to inspire a lot of young people that they can be the same.”
This year marks Marquez-Perez’s fourth as the artistic director of the Bayside Film Festival since its inception nine years ago. Reflecting back on the festival’s evolution, Marquez-Perez remarks that what he brought to the festival was synchronicity within the program by starting conversations with filmmakers early on.
Each year, leading up to the festival, the Bayside City Council runs the Youth Documentary Project and Digital Stories Project in various local high schools. The project aims to encourage youth to develop their creativity and self-expression through story telling. The shorts produced by the year 9 and 10 students are then screened at the festival. Marquez-Perez spends two to three hours with each school per week and says it’s “amazing to be able to sit there and talk to young filmmakers about their film and have a little bit of sway in how they’re going to shoot it or how they’re going to edit it”.
Some of his favourite films came out of Berendale High School, a school that caters for students with intellectual challenges. The stories were very simple but beautiful in their honesty and Marquez-Perez delights in seeing their enthusiasm “when they come into the cinema and watch their story on the big screen and people are engaging and they’re clapping. There’s something so incredibly powerful that allows us to open up a conversation with people with disabilities.”
The Bayside community has responded well to the festival. Marquez-Perez uses the example of one local woman he met during his first year as artistic director. She was unsure about whether or not to attend the festival so he challenged her to go along to see the closing night film and if she didn’t like it, her money would be refunded. The woman took up the challenge and returns each year to the festival. ”She went to other film festivals and didn’t find that connection. Some of the films she might not necessarily like but she thought they were relevant for the community,” he says.
The secret to this success is being accessible, approachable and programming quirky, original films that inspire quality conversations. For Marquez-Perez, a good film is all about the story and the conversation it sparks. The quality of the storytelling in Hollywood versus Independent cinema is an age-old debate with Hollywood often being referred to as ‘Trash Cinema’. However, “You can see a film like Mean Girls, which is about bullying – not necessarily a very good film but you look at the themes that have been touched upon.” Marquez-Perez then explains how the themes in such a film can inspire other filmmakers to take up that theme from a different angle. This call and response effect is “where interesting conversations happen”.
Another component to the festival is the Jump-Cut Competition – open to 10-25 year olds – which will also feature shorts from the UK, Sweden and Germany. Marquez-Perez hopes that the Youth Documentary Project and Jump Cut will also open up opportunities for emerging Australian filmmakers to screen overseas and to build up quality portfolios of work.
Previous to working with the Bayside City Council, Marquez-Perez ran the 15/15 Short Film Festival through which he met numerous filmmakers who are now very active in the industry today. Genevieve Bailey, director of the hugely successful documentary I Am Eleven, is one such filmmaker. Her work was featured in last year’s festival. Having known Bailey for twelve years, Marquez-Perez has been able to see how her work has evolved over time to its current standard of excellence. “That archival work is so valuable. That’s something that the Youth Documentary Project will have one day.”
The festival returns from the July 25-28 at Palace Cinemas, Brighton Bay.