When Melbourne Women in Film Festival director Sian Mitchell was announced as the 2022 recipient of the Natalie Miller Fellowship (NMF) in October last year, she said the $20,000 grant would allow her to strengthen her leadership skills through visiting events similar to her own.
It’s a journey that has since taken her to the Gender Equity in Media Festival in Vancouver, as well as France’s Festival International de Films de Femmes – the oldest women’s festival in the world.
Mitchell said the trip, conducted across March and April, offered some key learnings about how to engage more established filmmakers, whether through programming or ambassador roles, as well as the best way to manage programming streams.
“We’re a smaller festival compared to the one I went to in France but streamlining programs [the way it does] would help with our events and other kinds of workshops for local filmmakers to create conversation and dialogue,” she said.
“The other big thing was just meeting other women’s film festival directors to see what kind of things we could do together, such as reciprocal programming and showcases, where we might be able to screen some of their works and they can hopefully screen some of ours.”
A lecturer in screen and design at Deakin University with a PhD in film studies, Mitchell founded the Melbourne Women’s Film Festival along with several of her fellow academics in 2017.
After starting as a two-day event, it has since expanded to five days, incorporating screenings along with panel discussions, special events, panels, workshops, and education programs.
The seventh iteration of the festival, held in February at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, carried the theme of Connections and opened with Jub Clerc’s Sweet As.
Mitchell’s interest in the fellowship predates the festival, having first heard about it through Sue Maslin, a founding member of the initiative who also served as president up until 2021.
Named in honour of Sharmill Films and Cinema Nova founder Natalie Miller, NMF awards an annual grant of $20,000 to a woman working in the Australian screen industries to help realise a personal professional development proposal.
While Mitchell has long been aware of the program, she only recently met the eligibility requirements, which state that applicants must have ten years of professional experience.
In submitting for the 2022 fellowship, she chose to do a video pitch after being given advice from a filmmaker friend that it would be better if the committee could see her face.
Despite initially being apprehensive about putting herself on camera, she said the whole process was “really easy”, adding that she received guidance from the NMF team about how to shape her proposal.
“I did this one outside my comfort zone a little bit,” she said.
“I already had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to do in terms of proposing the project and then just got a bit of advice from some of the team at the NMF just to make sure I was on the right track.
“They do offer potential applicants the chance to have a bit of a chat and I would actually really recommend that because the angle I was initially going for wasn’t quite right, so it helped to reflect on what I actually wanted to do and then frame it in a way that would be more of a focus on professional leadership and professional practice.”
She said her advice to any prospective applicants would be to make sure they are explicit in their aims.
“I think it’s just [about] being really clear about how the fellowship is going to benefit building up those leadership skills and with whatever is being pitched with the project and then thinking about how that is going to be benefitting not only the Australian industry in some way but also women in Australian industry,” she said.
Mitchell hopes to continue strengthening her international network with a trip to next year’s Berlinale, an event that includes a forum for women’s film organisations. She is also in talks with Festival International de Films de Femmes about potentially contributing to a program that will coincide with the Paris 2024 Olympics.
The festival director credited her experience with the NMF with providing “the confidence to just be really upfront and ask for things”, as well as introduce herself to people and “build those networks out”.
“The support for that kind of network building has been incredibly, incredibly helpful because it is going to give me a lot more opportunity down the track,” she said.
Applications for the 2023 Natalie Miller Fellowship close Friday, September 22, 2023. Find out more information on how to apply here.