37th Festival 1990

Paul Byrnes, then Festival Director, notes in his opening to the 37th Festival program:

“There’s nothing like standing on the Berlin Wall at midnight, watching East German Army engineers hauling great chunks of cement into the air with cranes, to give one a sense of how much the world has changed in one year. I did that in February, during the 40th Berlin Film Festival, and I’ve tried, in the programing of our 37th festival, to find films that reflect those momentous changes. If there is a dominant bloc of films in these pages, it’s the cinema of Eastern Europe.”

As Byrnes acknowledges, when the wall fell, the world changed. This year in cinema saw large amounts of films being taken off the banned list in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Bulgaria. As a result, international film festivals were finally able to access decades of lost cinema from Eastern Europe, with SFF screening many of these, including Jiri Menzel’s Larks on a String and Ryszard Bugajski’s The Interrogation.

These screenings were perhaps overshadowed by the presentation of an extraordinary film series from Krzysztof Kieslowski in Decalogue. Comprised of 10 films, each an hour in length, and set in a Polish apartment building, this collection has only grown in cinematic stature with each passing year.

Another major film event was the retrospective of Preston Sturges films, with eight films screened, each introduced by Ken Bowser or Todd McCarthy, director and writer, respectively, of Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer.

Following the launch of the midnight screening sessions in 1989, this year saw the festival screen a series devoted to the first decade of Australian film, and another looking at jazz on film.

The Ian McPherson lecture was delivered by Dr. George Miller.

Opening Night Film: Dreams (directed by Akira Kurosawa)

Closing Night Film: A Dry White Season (directed by Euzhan Palcy)

Award Winners

Dendy Award for Australian Short Films (Fiction):

Outside Looking In, directed by Brendan Duhigg

Dendy Award for Australian Short Films (General):

Teenage Babylon, directed by Graeme Wood

Dendy Awards for Australian Short Films (Documentary):

No Problems, directed by Jackie McKimmie

Yoram Gross Animation Award:

Feral Television, directed by Damien Ledwich

STA Travel Award:

Swimming, directed by Belinda Chayko