Wed 19 Jun 2013 | 
Julia Scott-Stevenson
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Enlarge textAfter watching Go Back to Where You Came From last week, along with seemingly the rest of Australia given how much I then heard everyone talking about it over the following few days, the content has stayed with me. So it was fitting that I stumbled over a recent multimedia piece by MediaStorm on the same issue.
topAs predicted, I didn’t quite manage the three and a third films a day during the Sydney Film Festival that would have taken me to all 40 documentaries, but I did see 14 of them, as well as five fiction films.
SFF #6: Scarlet Road
An excellent social documentary I’ve seen at the Sydney Film Festival is Scarlet Road, another Aussie film which was competing for the Foxtel Documentary Prize (won yesterday by Life in Movement). The film follows Rachel Wotton, a Sydney-based sex worker who has many clients with disabilities, and who also works tirelessly to raise awareness of the sexual needs of people with disabilities through the organisation she helped to start, Touching Base.
SFF #5: Festival natives and an inspired approach
The Sydney Film Festival has, I think, done a great job with its documentary curation this year, sourcing a range of incredibly different yet mostly all effective documentaries. I remember being a bit underwhelmed by many of the offerings last year, but this year the films just keep surprising, entertaining and enlightening me (snooze-inducing film yesterday is a forgivable blip).
SFF #4: Recurring friends and content vs. form
There are some documentaries that demand discussion of the content only, films for which it seems irrelevant to comment on the form. How to Die in Oregon, screening at the Sydney Film Festival, is one of those films.
SFF #3: How to make a documentary
I watched two documentaries over the weekend at the Sydney Film Festival that I think are both, in essence, demonstrations of what makes a good documentary
Still from Position Among the Stars
SFF #2: Recurring monkeys and personal stories
My weekend of documentary viewing at the Sydney Film Festival so far has covered a range of styles, from the traditional in form to the user-generated. My second Aussie doco in competition at the festival was Tom Zubrycki’s latest film, The Hungry Tide.
Still from The Hungry Tide
SFF #1: Recurring hippos and justice-themed documentaries
One can tell that the Sydney Film Festival has begun when the attendees begin to roam near the cinemas wearing their subscriber passes around their necks like a badge of honour.
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About this Blog
Julia Scott-Stevenson Julia is a writer and researcher of all things documentary, and even dabbles in making them herself from time to time. She lived in the Pacific Islands of Fiji and Samoa for a few years, where she made a documentary about the inaugural Miss Tokelau beauty pageant and a short documentary about climate change in Samoa, which screened at the inaugural Pacific Climate Change Film Festival. While in the Pacific she was subjected to limited internet connectivity, and was staggered to discover the possibilities in online documentary on her return at the end of 2008. She has since been making up for lost time by undertaking a PhD researching cross-platform documentary, and also working on a database documentary about volunteers. Julia is also on the programming team for Antenna International Documentary Film Festival.
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