Trailer for VCA Film and Television's Digital Archive Project.
To celebrate its 50th anniversary this weekend, Victorian College of the Arts’ Film and Television School is releasing a digital archive of never-before-seen student films from throughout its history.
Australia’s oldest film school, which boasts a host of illustrious alumni such as Gillian Armstrong, Justin Kurzel, Emma Freeman and Richard Lowenstein, began at Swinburne Institute of Technology in 1966 and moved on to its present home at Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne in 1992.
To mark its 50th year, VCA Film and Television has begun releasing 50 unseen student films from over the past five decades.
The school’s head Nicolette Freeman compiled the films and said they provided an insight into how Australian society, culture and filmmaking have changed over the years.
The release forms part of an ongoing project to eventually make the school’s entire back catalogue publicly available.
Freeman told IF that given many of VCA’s students were relatively young, their films often depicted stories of childhood or adolescence.
However, over the last 20 or so years, she’s noted a particular increase in stories about first-generation migrant children.
“Stories told from the children's point of view, or they're the stories that parents have told them from their home country or about their time in Australia before they started a family.
“A really interesting example of that recently is Ariel Kleiman's graduation film, Deeper than Yesterday, that's set on a Russian submarine; a story inspired by stories his father told him about when he was in Russia,” Freeman said.
“Also, interestingly, stories about fractured families and single parent families are something that has developed more over the last ten to fifteen years.”
Freeman said she also saw an interesting tendency for students to sometimes make “safer” films in their graduation year, as they think of it as their calling card to the industry.
“We do as much as we can to keep that freshness and authenticity and energy going into the graduation year, but you’re also fighting the fact that, at that point, the students are investing more of their own money into the production; they think it’s their last chance,” she said.
Despite the expectation that it would be older postgraduate students who'd make more self-assured, confident or adventurous work, Freeman said that wasn’t always the case.
“Sometimes it’s the undergraduate students, like Ariel Kleiman or Jonathan auf der Heide, who are more brazen. They don’t have baggage about proving themselves. They think the world’s their oyster and so they can sometimes be more confident in their audaciousness,” she said.
VCA Film and Television School celebrates its anniversary on June 19.
http://vca.unimelb.edu.au/engage/vca-film-and-television-50th-anniversary