“I’ve barricaded the door so my one-year-old daughter doesn’t make too many cameos in too many Zooms.”
Like many other people, Al Cossar has had to make a few adjustments in working from home. But attention-seeking toddlers were far from the biggest problem for the director of the Melbourne International Film Festival when the city went into lockdown in March. Cossar and the MIFF board had to make a call on whether or not to cancel this year’s event, which was still five months in the future.
“It was a difficult decision and a heartbreaking one, but it was done with the utmost clarity,” Cossar says. “You’re talking about people’s safety first and foremost and the situation demanded a cancellation.”
Following the lead of other major international film festivals, and with the help of major benefactor Susie Montague, MIFF was able to announce a digital pivot. Subsequent events have only confirmed that the right decision was made. “We would have stuck by it regardless. With these additional restrictions in place, we’re happy we can still connect to audiences in a substantial way.”
And he means substantial. In contrast to the radically stripped-back, virtual Sydney Film Festival that took place in June with 33 films, ‘MIFF 68½’ boasts a healthy lineup of 113, including new movies from major international directors such as Kelly Reichardt and Benh Zeitlin; 12 world premieres; 82 Australian premieres; and a program of events including a script table reading of an Australian film classic.
Cossar and his co-programmers Kate Fitzpatrick and Kate Jinx have also programmed a festival in which 49 per cent of films have a female director.
“We wanted to do something that was true to the festival’s programming personality and the expectations of audiences,” Cossar says. “We hope it’s an opportunity for people to reach beyond Netflix and feel like they're engaging with culture from all over the world in the midst of a terrible situation.”
Read Time Out's picks of the festival.
Al, will every film be available to screen for the entire festival?
About 90 per cent of films will be available on-demand across August. The exception is the program Spotlights, which is essentially the substitution for our Galas, and Opening, Centrepiece and Closing films. Those will be presented at particular session times. Every film will have capacity attached to them, so films can sell out.
Your opening night film is the period drama First Cow, the new movie by US indie filmmaker Kelly Reichardt (Wendy & Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff).
That was the outcome of several months of conversations that started in one place and ended in another place. Everything was a very close negotiation on a title-to-title basis. It’s not just a case of selecting the films you want to play and putting them up there. It’s very involved.
First Cow centres on a mixed-race friendship, and coincidentally or not, race appears to be a big theme this year.
We always try to be topical and speak to the moment, and there are films that are very compelling in the context of Black Lives Matter and broader conversations that are happening.
Dark City Beneath the Beat, set in Baltimore, is a fascinating film in terms of music and social activism. It’s almost like the documentary form is being filtered through a music video. Coded Bias is another documentary, about the invisible forces and systems that surround us every day, in terms of facial recognition and surveillance and the algorithms that determine what we can and cannot do in our lives, and how there is systemic bias inherent in those. I think it will break a lot of conversations open.
The Giverny Document by American artist Ja'Tovia Gary was a prize winner at Locarno last year. It’s an experimental documentary [in which] she walks around Harlem and asks African-American women, ‘Do you feel safe?’
Coded Bias
Activism is a big part of the program, too.
Definitely. You have films like Hong Kong Moment, and Welcome to Chechnya, [about LGBT+ persecution], which is extraordinary and harrowing. 9 to 5: The Story of a Movement is the new film by the American Factory filmmakers, who won the Oscar this year. It’s a take on women’s rights in the workplace emerging in the ’70s.
There are films that speak to the theme of ‘loss’ in an interesting way as well. You’ve got Jean-Francois Lesages’s Prayer for a Lost Mitten, which is a film that is shot in black and white and set at the Montreal Metro lost and found booth. It starts with people trying to reclaim day-to-day items and spins out from there to be about the nature of loss, and there’s something about that that speaks to this current moment really interestingly.
Prayer for a Lost Mitten
Politics appears to be another important theme.
You can see that resonating across films like the four-hour, four-part City So Real, which is about the mayoral campaign in Chicago, and Mayor, which is about the mayor of Ramallah [Palestine], an extraordinary film. And Boys State is one of the docs of the year, an incredible film. It centres on a mass-scale leadership course in Texas where teenage boys go through an election process. I would take bets that it will be an Oscar Best Documentary nominee next year – it’s very crowd pleasing and funny, and has a huge amount to say about political division and whether it can be crossed.
But there are films that are purely entertaining and escapist as well.
That in itself is a programming response to where we are now! Paper Champions is a world premiere Australian film, set in Geelong, and really joyful. Shiva Baby is a really great comedy of awkwardness for audiences who like stuff like Obvious Child or Inappropriate Behaviour or Transparent.
We hear there’s going to be a table read of 1990 Sam Neill-Zoe Carides black comedy Death in Brunswick.
It’s the 30th anniversary of the film and a table read has been something we have been looking at as a way of paying tribute to seminal Australian cinema. I love the idea of the celebration and rediscovery of these gems, and also varying the cast, and varying the directorial eye. It’s about making films resonant in new and interesting ways.
MIFF 68½ runs August 6-23. Tickets are on sale now.