• Award-winning writer, director and producer Chris Fitchett will assume the position of Acting Director of Film Development while the AFC continues an extensive search and interview process to fill the role. The Acting Deputy Director position will be filled by Lori Flekser, currently Project Manager, Administration. Chris was Chief Executive of the AFC's Commercial Television Production Fund and has been a Project Manager and Deputy Director of Film Victoria, where he was involved in financing films such as Proof, Romper Stomper, Love Serenade, Muriel's Wedding and Shine.



• A new partnership between the AFC and ABC New Media and Digital Services, the Broadband Cross-media Production Initiative (BCPI) seeks to fund innovative documentary projects for multi-platform delivery, particularly via digital television and broadband. The initiative seeks projects that target young and/or educational audiences in innovative, challenging and original ways. Deadline 3 February. Read our feature article on the BCPI launches that took place in Sydney and Melbourne.



• Christian Jeune, scout for the Cannes Official Selection (In Competition, Out of Competition, Un Certain Regard, Shorts Competition and Cinefoundation) will return to Australia in December. Christian will be available to view feature films and short films (strictly 15 mins or under only). If you have a feature or short film you would like to screen for him, contact Tilly Heald on (02) 9321 6444 or tollfree 1800 226 315 (outside NSW) to discuss suitability and arrangements. Please first ensure your film fulfils festival criteria by reading the rules and regulations found at Cannes Official Selection.



• To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the classic film Picnic at Hanging Rock, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance hosted a screening of the Director's Cut. AFC Chief Executive Kim Dalton spoke about starting his career as 2nd Assistant Director on the film.



• Pordenone Silent Film Festival, in the charming little town of Sacile in Italy, is the most prestigious international forum for archivists, curators, film scholars and cinephiles. The Sentimental Bloke screened to a full capacity audience with live accompaniment by Jen Anderson and the Larrikins. Director of the NFSA, Paolo Cherchi Usai, was in attendance.



• Joel Schumacher is the US director of both big and little budget Hollywood studio films, including Phone Booth, 8MM, Veronica Guerin, Flawless, Tigerland, Falling Down and the 80s classics The Lost Boys and St Elmo's Fire. He was keynote speaker at this year's ASDA Conference in September. You can read an edited transcript of his talk on low-budget filmmaking.

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• Podlove, a new initiative developed and funded by the AFC and SBSi, will explore the impact of digital communications on our relationships with friends, family, lovers and strangers. Five avant-garde documentaries of five minutes each will be broadcast on SBS television and be placed on an advanced interactive website. The Podlove films will use mixed media, utilising digital technologies and hybrid content to maximise the visual and aural aesthetics of the work, producing challenging and compelling stories with a strong narrative and universal appeal. Live action, animation, composite imagery, visual and aural processing, and archival as well as alternatively sourced material may be combined in the production of each documentary. Guidelines and application forms are now available on the AFC website. Deadline 10 March.



• The AFC has extended its support for the digital sector with the introduction of a new funding strand in its Travel Grant program. The Type E Travel Grant will provide support for Australian interactive digital screen content practitioners to attend key international workshops, forums, conferences, festivals, events and financing markets. Created in response to the increase in innovative digital screen content, the grant expands the opportunities for local practitioners to represent their work in an international context, engage with leading industry figures, and further develop and finance their projects. New Travel Grant guidelines are now on the AFC website.



• AFC funding deadlines - November/December:
  
  FILM DEVELOPMENT
  11 Nov: Filmmaker Fellowships & Attachments
  25 Nov: Strand L - Shooting Time-Critical Material
  
  INDIGENOUS
  25 Nov: Documentary Development
  
  TRAVEL GRANTS
  The deadline for Type B and Type C Travel Grants for producers to attend the European Film Market (EFM) is 1 December. Producers should note there are new Travel Grant guidelines on the AFC website. EFM runs from 9-19 February 2006 and is on in conjunction with the Berlin International Film Festival.



• AFC funding approvals

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• Join cultural historian, commentator, and documentary filmmaker Tony Moore for a lager to celebrate the launch of his addition to Currency Press' Australian Screen Classics Series, The Barry McKenzie Movies. Please RSVP to the launch by 8 November to Angela Todorovski, (03) 8663 2585 or email angela.todorovski@acmi.net.au. Saturday 12 November, 6pm, at ACMI Function Space (Ground Floor), Federation Square, Flinders Street, Melbourne. The launch will be followed by a film screening of The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. Contact ACMI Box Office for tickets on (03) 8663 2583. Presented by ACMI, National Film and Sound Archive (a division of the Australian Film Commission) and Currency Press.



• This year's Longford Lyell Lecture will be presented by prominent film director Rolf de Heer in Melbourne on 27 November. Past lecturers have included Anthony Buckley, Jan Chapman, Sue Milliken and the late Tim Burstall. The lecture was devised to honour the memory of Australian cinema pioneers Raymond Longford and Lottie Lyell, who made many silent films together including the classic The Sentimental Bloke, released in 1919.



• 27 October marked the 25th anniversary of a historic recommendation by UNESCO that the world should safeguard its moving image heritage as a powerful expression of cultural identity. Director of the NFSA, Paolo Cherchi Usai, acknowledged the significance of the recommendation: "It was an extremely important statement for film archivists. The world, through the United Nations, was acknowledging that this relatively new medium of communication was a very fragile thing and that it needed special measures to preserve it."



• On 14 October, the Federal Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Helen Coonan, announced the framework for the introduction of digital radio in Australia. Senator Coonan said that digital radio has the potential to deliver a range of new and innovative services. The NFSA's Senior Curator of Sound, Matthew Davies, was presented with an Evoke 1 Digital Radio, the biggest selling digital radio in the world. The radio's manufacturer, English company Pure Digital, donated the radio to the NFSA so that, from the very beginning, digital radio would be represented in the NFSA's national collection.



• When radio station 2UE undertook some major renovations of its studios in Sydney recently, the NFSA arranged for a large part of the studio used by John Laws for more than 15 years to be relocated to the national collection in Canberra. John Laws has been a dominant figure in Australian radio for more than 30 years and the studio equipment will form an important part of the NFSA's collection, which charts the history of radio in this country.

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• Barbara Stanwyck will illuminate the silver screen in Adelaide and Melbourne at the AFC's National Cinematheque. Hollywood's most underrated screen queen (1907-1990) forged a remarkably enduring career over more than 40 years, 88 movies and four Academy Award nominations. The program features some of Stanwyck's most radiant performances including early pre-Hayes Code dramas and wistful romances such as Baby Face, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Forbidden, Sorry, Wrong Number, Forty Guns, No Man of Her Own and There's Always Tomorrow. Adelaide: Mercury Cinema, 21-24 November; Melbourne: ACMI Cinemas, 7-21 December.
  
  Courtesy of the NFSA, the AFC's National Cinematheque program returned to Canberra with All Art is One: the Visionary Cinema of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, in a season presented in association with Canberra's Electric Shadows cinemas. Future Cinematheque programs will be announced later this year and in 2006. The Cinematheque is Australia's leading program of film classics, archival rarities and secret gems of the world's film heritage.



• In October Big Screen travelled through Tasmania to Launceston and Burnie. The special screening of The Sentimental Bloke in Launceston was a great success. The following weekend, special guest Noni Hazlehurst presenting the opening night film Little Fish in Burnie, a sell-out event. Oyster Farmer also screened for a full week and Big Screen partnered with Big hART - an award-winning non-profit organisation which pilots arts based projects for marginalised young people to re-engage them in their community - to present a retrospective program of their short films. There were good numbers throughout the festival, particularly for the screening of Gems from the Archive, and four cinemas were needed to accommodate all the children at No Worries.



• Embassy Roadshow update: In November the Roadshow is travelling to Lisbon, the second time it's been to Portugal. Vietnam has a major Australian Film Festival in Hanoi, screening 12 features with shorts, before a mini festival in Da Nang City. Ho Chi Minh City will then host the full program in early December. As a result of the increasingly successful events held in China, and a festival of new films in Beijing and Shanghai, the program will premiere in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia in late November. The Roadshow is a travelling film festival that showcases contemporary Australian films to international audiences, facilitated through Australian embassies and posts abroad. It is an initiative of the Australia International Cultural Council through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and is coordinated by DFAT and the AFC.



• The Australian film industry's awards season has begun with the recent ATOM Awards in Melbourne. Coming up in the next few months are the AWGIES, IF Awards, AFI Awards and the Film Critics Circle of Australia Awards. For more information on the events see WHAT'S ON below.



• Hot on the heels of its screenings in Toronto and San Sebastian, Look Both Ways (w/d: Sarah Watt) was selected to screen at Korea's Pusan International Film Festival 05, together with Jewboy (w/d: Tony Krawitz), which screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes this year, and two documentaries having their international premieres: Vietnam Symphony (d: Tom Zubrycki, p: Kerry Herman) and Betelnut Bisnis (d: Chris Owen, p: Andrew Pike).



• Interactive project Underworld (w/d/p: Jennie Swain) has won an award in the e-Health category at this year's World Summit on the Information Society Awards. The awards recognise the best creative use of interactive digital media in content and diversity globally. Jennie will travel to the event with the assistance of the recently announced Type E (digital media) Travel Grant, to present her work at the World Summit Events and Exhibitions which takes place in Tunis, 16-18 November.



• Kidnapped! (d/p: Melissa Lee, p: John Janson-Moore) has been selected to screen at the prestigious International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA) in the Silver Wolf competition. Butterfly Man, a short AFTRS documentary (d: Samantha Rebillet) will also screen in the competition. IDFA runs from 24 November - 4 December, and both Australian filmmakers will attend IDFA with AFC Travel Grant assistance.



• Nine filmmakers pitched their concept for a short film of 10 minutes or less to an audience and judging panel at OPENChannel's Short and Sharp Pitching Event on 26 October. The winning filmmaker was Justin Batchelor, who pitched Debt, a concept for a five-minute music clip. The judging panel included AFC Project Manager Karin Altmann, producer Peter George (Original Schtick, The Dream of Love) and OPENChannel's Executive Producer, Liz Burke.



• November/December film submission deadlines are coming up for the following international festivals: Rotterdam International Film Festival (IFFR), Goteborg Film Festival, Creteil International Women's Film Festival, Cinema Du Reel, Berlin International Film Festival, Aspen Shortsfest, Tampere International Short Film Festival and Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film. See Festival Profiles for more information.

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• On 20 October, the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) adopted an International Convention on Cultural Diversity, which "reaffirms the sovereign right of States to elaborate cultural policies with a view to protect and promote the diversity of cultural expressions." Read the full text.

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• Read about the success of AFC-supported projects. This month we feature Clara, Cool, Grange, Jasper Morello, Jewboy, Mademoiselle and the Doctor and Moustache.



• Are you looking for details of a particular Australian film title: feature, short, TV drama or documentary? The Searchable Film Database includes Australian and co-produced features, TV drama and documentaries from 1990 and shorts from 1998. It is updated on the AFC website each month.



• Upcoming Production Report.



• Latest updates to Get the Picture Online.

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• Welcome to Licensing and Rights Officer Nelson de Sousa, Conservator (Works on Paper) Carey Garvie, Receptionist/Mailroom Assistant Jane Griffiths, Assistant Cinema Programmer Fiona Gunn, Coordinator for the Centre for Scholarly and Archival Research Marilyn Higgins, Curatorial Administrator Belinda Hunt, Curatorial Assistant Tara Marynowsky, Reference Services Officer Janelle Mikkelsen, PRC Administrative Assistant (p/t) Zeynep Selcuk, Co-production Officer Hugh Short and Film and Video Archivist Simon Smith. Farewell Video and Telecine Services Andrew Miles.
  
  
• Positions vacant: Policy Research Assistant - Indigenous position (Sydney); Project Coordinator, Indigenous Program (Sydney); Admin Assistant, Marketing Branch (Sydney); Vaults Officer (Canberra) - deadline 17 November; Project Coordinator, Education Programs (Sydney) - deadline 24 November.

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• The Australian films Jewboy, Little Fish, Look Both Ways, Josh Jarman, The Magician, The Proposition and Wolf Creek are screening November-December so keep an eye out for them at your local cinema.



• The touring Trasharama-Agogo Film Festival, 7 October - 30 November, showcases the cream of Australian horror, sci-fi, bad taste comedies, dodgymentaries, sick animations, B-grade schlock and other filmic disasterpieces.



• The new documentary Opera Therapy screens on SBS, 10 November at 8.30pm. Four people - each of whom has battled with cancer, one still living with a terminal diagnosis - experience the transformative power of self-expression as they create an opera based on their personal stories. This therapeutic process is a world first, and is documented as it unfolds under the guidance of talented music therapist Emma O'Brien (from the Royal Melbourne Hospital) and the creative team of a respected opera company.




• The Film Critics Circle of Australia (FCCA) Awards are on in Melbourne on 12 November. The FCCA is the national, professional body of film critics in Australia. For over a decade, they have been celebrating excellence in Australian film at the FCCA Annual Awards dinner.



• The Lexus Inside Film Awards have secured a raft of acclaimed Australian talent as presenters for the seventh annual red-carpet event including Little Fish actress Noni Hazelhurst, industry veteran Bryan Brown (Dirty Deeds, Cocktail) and special guest presenter Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange). The awards will be broadcast live on SBS Television, 23 November, 8.30pm from Sydney's Luna Park.



• The AWGIES recognise and celebrate excellence in writing for film, television, theatre, radio and new media. In 2005, the inaugural AWGIE Award for Interactive Media will be presented alongside AWGIE Awards for feature film, stage, TV series, telemovie, mini-series, music theatre, documentary, short film, comedy, children's TV and theatre for young audiences. The event, in Melbourne on 25 November, will be hosted by The Chaser's Julian Morrow and Chas Licciardello.



• The AWG Working Words on Screen Masterclasses bring together two of the UK's leading screenwriters and script developers, Adrian Hodges and Lucy Scher, for a series of masterclasses and industry talks. They will each host their own two-day masterclass session over the weekend following the AWGIE Awards (25-26 November) and on the 27th they will co-host Writer Interrogation, a two-hour public talk on screenwriting.



• The AFI Awards are the Australian film and TV industry's longest running awards ceremony. Now in their 47th year, the awards focus industry and public attention on the best in Australian film and television productions. This year there are two ceremonies in Melbourne, both hosted by Russell Crowe: 25 November - Craft Awards; 26 November - Awards dinner.



• X|Media|Lab, Australia's new media think-tank, conference and production workshop, is again a flagship event of the Melbourne on Screen Festival. The event includes a Conference on 25 November and the Lab on 26-28 November,



• The Small Screen Big Picture TV Conference, in Fremantle, 25-26 November, is WA's premier screen industry event, bringing the brightest talents from the national and WA screen industry together with some of the most influential and high-profile television producers, writers, executives, commissioning editors, analysts and thinkers and commentators from Australia and the world.



• Immersion: Northern Rivers Screenworks, in Byron Bay throughout December, will host three interrelated projects - clinics, masterclasses and a producers' incubator - aimed at the professional development of Northern Rivers and interstate practitioners.



• mo:life monthly is an informal gathering that offers the opportunity to discuss the latest advances and opportunities in mobile media technology and culture. Find out about the various players and networks and what they offer; explore the capabilities of the latest handsets; and see what others around the globe are doing with this new format. Contact d.opitz@metroscreen.org.au



• Metro Screen's Members Production Group (MPG) meets on the first Tuesday of every month at 6.30pm at Metro Screen. Meetings are open to all Metro Screen members and give you the opportunity to pitch new ideas, discuss your current projects, share skills and resources and collaborate with others to produce your own films, TV content and media projects.



• ScreenWest and PAC Screen Workshops have announced the initiative PAC Script Lab, monthly rehearsed readings of West Australian feature film scripts on the last Sunday of each month. The ultimate aim is for a honing of West Australian scripts and an increase in the profile, quality and awareness of West Australian film projects.



• IF Magazine's What's On in Film July to December 2005 guide to screen events is sponsored by the AFC. Contact publishing@afc.gov.au for a hard copy.



• Other AFC-supported activities and events.

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On 18-19 October the new Broadband Cross-media Production Initiative (BCPI) was launched in Melbourne and Sydney. BCPI is a partnership between the AFC and ABC New Media and Digital Services. It seeks to fund innovative documentary projects for multi-platform delivery, particularly via digital television and broadband.

To help explain the initiative, a number of documentary filmmakers - who worked on the previous Broadband Production Initiative - did a show and tell of their online projects, giving tips on moving between film and digital media, and the technical challenges and creative possibilities of working across a range of platforms.

Read an edited transcript from the night.

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