The Sydney Film Festival celebrates its 60th edition in June 2013. Although the Melbourne International Film Festival started in 1952, two years earlier, Sydney can still boast one of the oldest, continually running film festivals in the world.
This year’s festival sees the world premiere of the NFSA’s digital restoration of Wrong Side of the Road (1981), the first Australian feature with an all-Indigenous cast.
The festival has also included a special screening of The Back of Beyond (1954), from the NFSA’s Film Australia Collection, which screened at the first festival 60 years ago.
The only Australian film in this year’s 12-film Official Competition is The Rocket, director Kim Mordaunt’s dramatic feature debut. It has thematic similarities to his documentary Bomb Harvest (2007), which is also set in Laos and screened at the Sydney Film Festival in 2007.
Every year the festival highlights the best in world cinema, but has also proved a discovery ground for Australian talent as you can see from the other titles on our homepage this week.
Festival Director David Stratton programmed Tim Burstall’s 2000 Weeks in 1969, one of the first features in the modern era of Australian cinema.
Since 1970, the festival has awarded films for Australian shorts, animation and documentary, uncovering filmmakers like Jane Campion in the process. Her short A Girl’s Own Story won the Rouben Mamoulian Award in 1984.
Mutt won the Yoram Gross Animation prize in 2008.
Image: Peter Butler and Ronnie Ansell in Wrong Side of the Road (1981).
More information
Sydney Film Festival website for tickets and film information
Online commemorative catalogue Sydney Film Festival 1954 to Now: A Living Archive
The right time for a Wrong Side of the Road reunion – NFSA media release
