This website has emerged as something of a champion for Adelaide’s moviejuice group, and there was a distinct buzz around town for the one-day (but all day) Semaphore Film Festival held recently at the Star-Odeon. Not only did this mark a major step forward in the ambitions of the group, but the best news is that the day was climaxed by the premiere of what is undoubtedly the best film to emerge from moviejuicedom: Gabe Bath’s feature The Next Time You Feel Important.

Bath’s work figures repeatedly in Bill Mousoulis’ best film of the year lists, but this was not sufficient to prepare any of us for the ferocious deluge of inventiveness to be encountered in his new work. Subtitled The Sailor Film, Part 1, the film has been three years in the making with the mercurial Bath and partner Emily Pottinger repeatedly popping up around town in sailor’s whites.

The film follows a loose, hallucinatory story of a sailor (Bath) who washes ashore only to be assailed by a motley collection of Bluto-like adversaries: cops, demons, vampires and clowns who are both angry and melancholic. It incorporates family material, travel footage, frenzied confrontations on the beach, instructions to the audience (“this sequence is best watched if you stand and spin around seven times”) and at one point the action even explodes off the screen and into the auditorium as the sailor is pursued down the aisle by demons who have to be restrained by audience members. The final effect of The Next Time You Feel Important is an invigorating refusal to live any other way than playfully, wildly and imaginatively.

Bath has reworked the images obsessively in the editing, putting an enormous amount of energy into distorting and animating over them. While this is a gesture that is starting to look a little routine in some avant-garde filmmaking, it is rare to see it so successfully varied. The triumph of the film is this remarkably sustained inventiveness, its refusal to lie down and be interpreted. What do we do with an avant-garde sailor?

Bath’s creative partner (and one of the main organisational forces behind moviejuice) Emily Pottinger kicked off the day with her own film, Jazzer Mouse, which combines her interest in networks of popular culture with the possibilities offered by film stock for creative manipulation. She has flashed the film stock—given it prior exposure—before reusing it for principal photography with a diffracting filter. The subject matter includes discussion of familiar cultural figures such as Mickey Mouse and Clint Eastwood, though the visual effect is to defamiliarize the everyday, to question just how well we know our world.

The festival program was replete with a lot more alternative local programming that shows the richness of local youth filmmaking culture still flying beneath the radar of state funding agencies. Manny Ashman (who some will remember as the title character in Tim Carlier’s Paco) showed a work in progress, Semaphoria. Ashman’s 7 Minutes to Rice screened at the last Adelaide Film Festival (AFF). This new film continues his growing fascination with long and complex takes that interweave multiple storylines. The fragment of work we saw was set in a café a hundred meters down the road from the cinema in which we sat. Ashman’s long takes are leading him in the direction of Hou Hsiao-hsien, or perhaps Robert Altman might be more appropriate. Seeing it on the same day as Bath’s interventionist and montage-based style, provides a strong sense of the diversity of aesthetic directions driving the local filmmaking scene.

Some of the other local films had also been screened at AFF—where Moviejuice’s curated screenings provide a vital counterbalance to the more conservative art cinema programming—and demonstrate emerging networks of collaborators. Jordy Pollock’s Wabi Sabi Rendezvous dates from 2024, and was shot by Sam Twidale, who was also cinematographer on Ashman’s films, and stars Hebe Sayce, whose short animation Mermaid Maker fitted the littoral theme that gave a loose unity to the programming.

My concentration thus far on local filmmaking is perhaps misleading as the festival programme contained wildly different features. Coming out of John Milius’ 1978 Big Wednesday with its unashamedly emotional appeals, you ran headlong into Brazilian Matias Piñeiro’s You Burn Me, an essayistic contemplation of signification and poetry, which was the type of demandingly cerebral film that the critics of CinemaScope used to drool over. The program also contained an eclectic mix with films by Eric Rohmer, Gregg Araki, Hayao Miyazaki and Claire Denis.

One of the most valuable tenets of cinephile communities is the belief that you should see, and have opinions about, everything. On this website recently Mike Retter bemoaned the lack of a cinephile sensibility among Australian filmmakers. This is a complaint that is as widespread as it is longstanding. I suspect it springs from the role played by cultural nationalism in justifying Australian production and the mistaken assumption that Australia lacked any substantial filmmaking history. Let us acknowledge how important a body such as moviejuice is in spanning this abyss between cineastes and cinephiles. And the big news is that you can have fun while doing it.

The Semaphore Film Festival was a memorable magical movie day. Perhaps at the end of the twenty-first century there will be one old fart in her bunker who will turn to her android carer and say, “You know, there was a day once when I was in a room full of people who weren’t satisfied with the same old shit.”