Press Release from Miranda Brown Publicity
The BigPond Adelaide Film Festival (BAFF) is delighted to announce that the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MOMA), will host a week-long festival of Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund films (AFFIF) from 7 to 13 April 2011. The MOMA week will be a salute to BAFF and the groundbreaking AFFIF, a testament to its vision and success in realising some of the most unique, creative, interesting, challenging and entertaining Australian films of the recent past.
Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator of Film at MOMA said, ‘In a remarkably short period of time, the BigPond Adelaide Film Festival has distinguished itself from other international film gatherings. BAFF has become major, not only through its judicious selection of films, but by the remarkable number of extraordinary works that the Festival has supported with production funds; The Adelaide Film Festival has, in effect, a ‘curatorial’ investment fund, investing in works which world premiere at the Festival. The track record of the works the Fund assisted has indeed been both distinguished and impressive, making possible several features that have achieved celebrity and won awards at festivals the world over. The Museum of Modern Art, New York is pleased to recognise the achievements of BAFF to world cinema with this exhibition of cutting edge films.’
The program will include Sarah Watt’s Look Both Ways (2005), which won The Discovery Award at Toronto Film Festival and is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Rolf de Heer’s much applauded Ten Canoes (2006), and Warwick Thornton’s award-winning Samson and Delilah (2009), which won Cannes’s prestigious ‘Camera d’Or’ for Best First Feature. As part of the salute to the AFFIF, MOMA is pleased to present the New York premieres of a short film, Stunt Love (2011), and four feature films Boxing Day (Kriv Stenders 2007), Last Ride (Glendyn Ivin 2009), My Year Without Sex (Sarah Watt, 2009) and Mrs. Carey’s Concert (Bob Connolly and Sophie Raymond, 2011).
‘I am delighted that the strength and quality of BigPond Adelaide Film Festival and leading edge Investment Fund is being acknowledged by the prestigious Museum of Modern Art in this way’, said Hon. Mike Rann MP, Premier of South Australia. ‘Recognition at an international level of this kind is testament to the quality and vigour of direction provided by founding Festival Director Katrina Sedgwick, and Cheryl Bart, founding Chair of the Festival Board, and their teams in such a short period of time.’
The 2011 BigPond Adelaide Film Festival will take place from 24 February to 6 March 2011. The festival program embraces the diversity and complexity of the moving image as it appears all around us – on screen, online, on television, in galleries, and on the street, and consolidates BAFF’s position as the most innovative and creative film festival in Australia. Since its inception in 2002, BAFF has developed into one of the most groundbreaking and anticipated events on the International screen calendar. In 2008, Variety magazine featured BAFF in its list of "50 Unmissable Film Festivals”.