MIFF - the fall out

Apologies to regular readers for lack of activity over the past month. I've been overseas and on returning - well, catching up with work has been the top priority, or more like it that's just a convenient excuse. More likely it's that old "once you stop, it's hard to start again" thing. You know, inertia.

Anyways, here's the first of a few posts linking to recent articles and reviews - a wrap up of my three days at Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) last weekend for the SBS Film website. (All comments welcome, naturally, but a small request - at the SBS site rather than here, please.)

Extract:

"As this year’s event hit its final weekend and retiring executive director Richard Moore (pictured above right) came to the end of his four year tenure he told SBS Film that ticketing revenue had grown this year by 6 % of which only 2.5 % could be explained by increased prices.

"Moore effectively confirmed rumours that he was less than happy about the festival's management changes when he added that it was 'ironic to have an improvement in all fronts, including an increase in box office averaging seven per cent per year, and the structure that has achieved that is being changed.'

"MIFF's board had announced his job as executive director was to be split in two – a general manager and an artistic director – and then invited him to apply for one of the positions (meaning he would have been competing with other candidates for a job that carried less responsibility than he had previously had).

Moore responded by revealing in February that he was moving onto a job in August as head of screen culture at Screen Queensland, where he would be in charge of the Brisbane International Film Festival. MIFF has yet to appoint a new artistic director, a position that will be initially be contracted for 12 months only.

"If last year’s record attendances were partly a result of the festival becoming a front page major news item thanks to Chinese hackers, this year’s results show that local audiences remain remarkably loyal... "

An observation I didn't manage to fit into the SBS piece: its sad that just as Sydney Film Festival gets over its painfully long-standing financial and managerial blues and starts to soar, its southern cousin/ rival/ whatever should give off such obviou tensions between its executive director and board.

This kind of tension is not unusual in arts organisations but for it to leak out like this is a sign that Moore leaves the festival with a degree of bitterness. Why did this have to be? The festival's audience growth during his four year term speaks for itself, and his expansion of cult and genre cinema has been achieved without any diminution of more serious and challenging art house programming.

Whatever the health of its audiences and the support from financial stakeholders, this can't help but give off a bad smell that may well be still hanging around for Moore's successors.

As for the "Is MIFF too-big?" question, I examine this in the SBS piece but will add here that the main problem is not only that a huge program makes navigation of the festival needlessly difficult, it inevitably means a drop of curatorial standards.

A sum total of 477 slots to fill in all likeihood means including mediocre material that would fail to make the cut in a smaller and more rigourously curated program. In the SBS piece I look at why any major reduction is unlikely to happen: Melbourne audiences just keep piling in.

I've long been amazed - alright, I admit, jealous - of the size and enthusiam of MIFF's audiences and the intensity and energy of the city's film culture in general (the size of those queues for ACMI's -incidentally, splendid - Tim Burton exhibition!).

The trouble is, they know it - the smug buggers.