Newtown Flicks Festival
Only one week after its premiere at A Night Of Horror in Paddington, The New Life will move to another Sydney suburb to compete at the Newtown Flicks Festival, that takes place from Friday 30th March and Sunday 1st April. The Newtown Flicks Festival is an annual event dedicated to short films and aimed at encouraging aspiring filmmakers to take part in the industry. It offers many opportunities to network and gain advice from people with the know-how on all aspects of filmmaking including equipment, software and technological developments to directing, writing and producing. It is also a wonderful opportunity to keep showing The New Life in Sydney. The New Life will be showing as part of a block of horror and sci-fi films on Sunday 1st April at 6pm at the Newtown Theatre, Corner King and Bray Streets, Newtown South, Sydney.

I attended the Newtown Flicks Festival on Friday which was the opening evening. A cross-section of films was shown and the band Open played after on what I would call the most minimalistic stage I've ever seen. Then I went back on Sunday evening for the screening of The New Life and the awards ceremony that followed right after. Unfortunately the theatre's sound (which I believe was perfectly okay on Friday night) somehow was buggered over the weekend and as a result the films audio was somewhat muffled but this sort of things happen. I'm still very happy that people in Sydney had another chance of watching The New Life only one week after its Australian premiere. The festival was programmed by genres, so The New Life was part of a sci-fi/horror combo. Even then it was quite a diverse lot and it was good to see some films like This Girl directed by Jessica Lockhart. It's hard to define genre wise but it could be roughly described as a supernatural dark comedy, which appealed to me above the rest. As I said, the organisers of the festival had the good sense of programming the films by genres, yet unfortunately the awards followed a more conservative pattern where you had best student film, best independent film, best doco, etc. I say unfortunately because as soon as you get an average jury conformed by journalists, actors, etc., certain genres like horror won't stand a chance in hell. So if this serves as feedback for future editions, there you have it. Don't get me wrong, the winners were all outstanding examples of filmmaking. The winner of the student category, Still Life directed by Tahnee McGuire, is an excellent film that I happened to have the honour of picking as a finalist of another contest a couple of years ago in my only instance as a jury member. Nevertheless, and while we are hopefully giving some feedback to the festival's organisers, there are certain things that they should refrain from doing. Do not have a category which is called "independent" if you're going to include and award films produced with the assistance of government funding, because that's a mockery to the truly independent films. for which their authors have shared blood, sweat and tears to make them. Do not include and award films longer than the allowed length set by the entry criteria, no matter how poignant they may be, because six additional minutes well used can make all the difference. And last but not least, don't charge participating filmmakers to attend the awards ceremony because it's just mean. :)