34th Festival 1987

With Claude Lanzmann as a festival guest and Ian McPherson lecturer, the 1987 festival highlighted the importance of Lanzmann’s incredible two-part, five and a half-hour Holocaust documentary, Shoah. The film was produced over the course of 10 years, preceded by three and a half years of preparatory research. Not one frame of the film is archival footage; all of it is comprised of interviews with those who experienced the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand. As noted in the program notes for the film, “Shoah should be compulsory viewing for all humankind.”

A special programme of Argentinian cinema was screened, as was a night of US independent cinema that was sponsored by radio station Triple J. The Alliance Française de Sydney sponsored a night of new French cinema was well.

This year also marked the first Yoram Gross Award for Animation in the short-film competition.

Opening Night Film: Travelling North (directed by Carl Schultz)

Closing Night Film: Showgirl’s Luck (directed by Norman Dawn; retrospective from 1931)

Award Winners

Greater Union Award for Australian Short Films (General):

Shoppingtown (directed by David Caesar)

Greater Union Award for Australian Short Films (Fiction):

Kick Start (directed by Charles Sandford)

Greater Union Award for Australian Short Films (Documentary):

Making Biscuit (directed by Sharon Laura)

Yoram Gross Animation Award:

In Love Cancer (directed by Jenny Robertson)

Rouben Mamoulian Award

Kick Start (directed by Charles Sandford)

Greater Union Distributors Prize:

Palisade (directed by Laurie Mclnnes)