DIY Screenings by Bill Mousoulis |
Do it
yourself. When the world doesn’t
respond, find your own space. Your own
agency, your own activity, your own life. Size doesn’t matter. Do what you
can, in your own way, and have fun.
Increasingly,
since about the turn of the millennium, things have got difficult for
Australian independent filmmakers (I mean those who make more radical work, not
the mainstream-wannabes) to find avenues for their work to be seen. The major film festivals in this country are
squeezing out the more alternative indie films, because there’s more
demand/pressure from more commercial titles. In this changing landscape, where theatrical box office is down,
commercial producers use the festivals as a way of showcasing their features,
before they go to VOD platforms. This
basically means that these films are now taking more and more festival slots
away from the indie films. Indie work
will screen in the major festivals only if it has funding or distribution
attached. If you’re a maverick
filmmaker, you’re out in the cold.
Yes, there are
some smaller film festivals in Australia that cater for the more maverick
filmmakers, such as the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, or the Sydney
Underground Film Festival, or Monster Fest, but these tend to focus on genre
work and/or more quirky cum transgressive work. If you’re an experimental filmmaker, or an avant-garde narrative
filmmaker, or even just a plain narrative filmmaker in the “subtle drama” mode of
Rohmer or Bresson, there’s nowhere for you to go.
Having made
numerous films since 1982, I’ve seen this shift unfold. I’ve had films (both funded and unfunded
ones) screen in the major film festivals in Australia from the late ‘80s to the
early ‘00s, and then, in the last 15 years, nothing. Over the past 10 years, I’ve worked mainly in
Greece, and my features, such as A
Nocturne (2007, made in Australia) and Wild
and Precious (2012, made in Greece) got into some major, and some minor,
festivals in Greece and the rest of Europe. But, last year, 2017, I found that my new feature Songs of Revolution (2017, made in Greece) was struggling to get
into any kind of festivals, even ones I’d been in just 5 years earlier, in
2012. Admittedly, the film is difficult
to categorise (half documentary, half narrative) and also strong politically
(anarchist/anti-establishment), but the change in the festival atmosphere
struck me as quite marked.
After having
failed to be accepted for the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival in March
2017, where it rightly should have had its World Premiere, I had to settle for
a small festival in the UK for the World Premiere of the film, the London Greek
Film Festival. There were all of 10
people in the audience. This was okay,
but there were no other festival appearances lined up for the film in the
subsequent months, it having been rejected from a dozen or so likely festivals
for it, and I had committed to staying in Greece for 5 months, from May to
October, to show the film in European festivals. It wasn’t looking flash, and I also knew the
Melbourne International Film Festival (scheduled for August 2017) probably
wouldn’t program the film, so my schedule was looking very barren.
As he was
organising more and more of these screenings, and thus being absent from Athens
for long stretches, I started hanging out at the main Athens anti-establishment
community centre Nosotros, where I could see first-hand community/DIY events
being organised, and how there was a thirst in the audience for these
events. The co-producer of my film,
Tasos Avouris, suggested I could screen my film at some of these anarchist
centres, and even those in other parts of Greece. This, combined with Athanitis’ example, was
all I needed.
I started liaising
with community centres and cafes (and whatever other venues I could think of)
to put on small screenings of my film, with Q&A, free entry, my expenses
paid. I found there was great interest
in putting my film on, especially as it was a film “of the street”, with
anti-government sentiments, and great local characters in it (protest singers
mainly). The beauty of this strategy was
that most of the venues came with a ready-made audience of their regulars, keen
to see this film and meet this odd filmmaker from beyond their shores.
In the busiest
month of my DIY screenings in Greece, September, I actually had 10 screenings
in 9 different cities, in the space of 25 days. All up, from May 2017 to February 2018, there have been 16 of these
small screenings in Greece (and I attended 13 of them, the other 3 occurring
after I had left Greece).
Arriving back in
Australia in October 2017, I decided to try a similar strategy in Australia, of
organising small screenings. So far,
from November 2017 to March 2018, there have been 5 such screenings in
Australia (4 in Melbourne, 1 in Sydney), and there are more on the horizon.
All up, even
with numerous festival rejections, my film Songs
of Revolution has so far screened to live audiences 23 times, 16 in Greece,
5 in Australia, and one each in UK and USA. To a total of about 1,000 people, which compares more than favourably
with features that may play in a few film festivals (even if they have an
audience of 100 or 200) and then disappear.
The breakdown of
the kind of venue is interesting –
Anarchist/self-run
community centre – 8 times
Unfortunately,
in Australia, it can be hard organising these smaller type screenings, as it’s
the Land of Plenty, which means most venues require a ridiculous hire charge,
even library and cafe spaces. And
there’s very few self-run collectives in Australia, where one can screen one’s
work and get a good “community spirit” happening. Money money money in this land Down Under!
But where
there’s a will, there’s a way. There’s a
bubbling brew of Australian underground indie filmmakers at the moment,
planning away, organising small screenings, at venues such as Long Play in
Melbourne, or the Artist Film Workshop, also in Melbourne. Walking into these venues, it feels like a
throwback to the days of the Melbourne Super 8 Film Group or the Melbourne
Filmmakers Co-op, groups that existed in the ‘70s and ‘80s. But that’s what we’ve come to. We have come full circle – we are back in a
conservative time, where alternative, underground filmmakers are shut out of
the system, just as they were back in the ‘60s. And that’s a recipe for movement.
Bill Mousoulis is a Greek-Australian independent filmmaker since 1982, and occasional writer on film. |
Published June 8, 2018. First published in Cinema Now zine, May 2018. © Bill Mousoulis 2018.
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