51st Festival 2004

It was Gayle Lake’s final year as Festival Director and, as she claimed, “the strongest and most diverse of the six festivals I have directed.” Amongst the films screened that year were Jørgen Leth’s and Lars von Trier’s engaging and odd documentary The Five Obstructions, Fatih Akın’s Head-On, Stephen Hopkins’ The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, Joshua Marston’s Maria Full of Grace, Andrey Zvagintsev’s The Return, Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder, Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs II, and Australian director (and multiple-Dendy Award-winner) Cate Shortland’s feature debut, Somersault.

There were restoration screenings of Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla, Raymond Longford’s The Sentimental Bloke (a superior reconstruction to the last time it screened at SFF in 1955) and The Merry Widow; a focus on Canadian film including a screening of Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World and a retrospective of Michelangelo Antonioni,.

This was also the year in which Adam Elliot’s Harvey Krumpet, which would later win an Academy Award for Best Animated Short, competed for the Dendy Award.

The Ian McPherson lecture was delivered by Brian Rosen.

Opening Night Film: In My Father’s Den (directed by Brad McGann)

Closing Night Film: Zatoichi (directed by Takeshi Kitano)

Award Winners

Dendy Award for Australian Short Films (Documentary):

Helen’s War: Portrait of a Dissident, directed by Anna Broinowski

Dendy Award for Australian Short Films (General):

Palermo – ‘History’ Standing Still, directed by Janet Merewether

Dendy Award for Australian Short Films (Fiction over 15 minutes):

Alice, directed by Garth Davis

Dendy Awardd for Australian Short Films (Fiction under 15 minutes):

Cracker Bag, directed by Glendyn Ivin

Yoram Gross Animation Award:

Birthday Boy, directed by Sejong Park

Community Relations Commission (CRC) Award:

So Close to Home, directed by Jessica Hobbs

Rouben Mamoulian Award:

Tom Murray and Allan Collins, directors of Dhakiyarr Vs. the King