Clare Stewart, Director of the Sydney Film Festival, has spent the year on the global film festival circuit.
With the festival just days away City Hub sat down with Clare to talk about her experience putting together this years festival line up, and ask if she had any tips for this years attendees
Tell us about your experience putting the SFF together this year?
Every year I attend festivals all around the world. This year I’ve been to the Toronto, Venice, Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, and Rotterdam film festivals.
My colleague Jenny Neighbour goes to a documentary festival in Amsterdam.
We see films at those festivals and we also see other films that are submitted over the course of the year. Collectively we see about 1500 films over the course of 12 months and make out choices based on that.
Have you got any recommendations or personal favourites that you’d recommend to our readers?
For every festival Director, every film is a personal favourite, because you’ve worked very hard to get each film into the line up.
I’m very excited about our official competition this year, we have both the Palme d’Or winner from the Cannes film festival; Terrence Malick’s film, The Tree of Life and also Take Shelter the film by Jeff Nichols that won Critics Week at Cannes. To have those films having their next screening with us is fantastic.
We also have some really amazing Australian films in the overall line up. The two films in the official competition are Sleeping Beauty and Toomelah. But there’s some fantastic Australian features throughout the program including 33 Postcards, Black & White & Sex, Hail, and LBF – which is part of Creative Sydney.
The Sydney Film Festival runs from June 8 to June 19. For more information visit http://www.sff.org.au/.
