Richard Moore is the Director of the Melbourne Film Festival, which begins its 2008 season on 25 July. Jo Case spoke to him on the eve of the festival’s opening about the new programming strands, this year’s focus on Australian film, the best of the political documentaries and films with a literary connection.

What are some of the main drawcards of this year’s Melbourne Film Festival?

Well, when you ask a festival director that you’re always going to open a can of worms! Can I say the lot? I guess I’d focus my attention on the new programming streams. It’s good to refresh the program, not only for the viewers, but also for ourselves. We don’t want to keep on doing the same thing. I’ll talk a bit about them all.

MIFF Premiere Fund

About a year ago, we were given money by the returned Brumby government to initiate a new film fund, which became the MIFF Premiere Fund. So, we’re a minority investor in Victorian films and documentaries. And one of the conditions of that is that the films premiere during the festival. So this year, for the first time in MIFF’s history, we’ve got our own production slate. This year, they all happen to be documentaries. Next year, they’ll all be films. We’re opening the festival with a MIFF Premiere Fund Film, Not Quite Hollywood.

Focus on Ozploitation

Another new strand, which spins off from the Not Quite Hollywood film is called Focus on Ozploitation, which we’re co-presenting with ACMI this year. For the first time in our shared histories, we’re doing a curatorial program together. And it’s a look at some of the best or worst excesses of the 1970s, early 80s, Ozploitation movies. We’re doing a small programming stream around six of those titles: Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, Dead End Drive-In, Long Weekend, Razorback, Road Games and Turkey Shoot.

I guess if you were trying to describe the films, you’d put them firmly in the B-grade division. I don’t think there is a verb ‘to ozploit’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, but if you were looking to try and define it, you’d get close if you looked at the act of chundering, or a couple of buckets of blood, engine oil and grease. A few raw prawns, maybe. They’re close, perhaps, to the spirit of Sir Les Patterson than to anything else more mainstream. They’re a nice element of the Australian films in the festival – a good addition to the ‘Homegrown’ section that we always have. There’s quite a big selection of Aussie films this year.

Free Radicals

Free Radicals is really for films that are deliberately exploring: pushing the boundaries, pushing the form, pushing the grain of the film … pushing everything! They defy accepted narrative patterns. They seek to subvert in some way or another. They’re films that we would normally associate with a festival like Rotterdam, rather than somewhere like Cannes or Berlin, which are usually a bit more mainstream. They haven’t abandoned narrative altogether, but they’re a bit more exploratory. They’re not what you might get in your standard multiplex.

Border Patrol

Border Patrol is a spin-off from a focus we did last year on contemporary Israeli film. This year it’s the sixtieth anniversary of the birth of Israel, and we thought it would be nice to do a different version of that. There are four films, all dramas, and they’re dramas that look, in different forms and style, at the so-called ‘Israeli/Palestinian question’, from different perspectives.

To be frank, there isn’t a lot of Palestinian cinema around. One film we’re featuring this year, Salt of the Sea, is very interesting as the very early beginnings of a Palestinian cinema. There’s Waltz with Bashir, which comes from Cannes this year, an animated documentary. I’m calling it by a new phrase, ‘animentary’, and it’s about one soldier’s repressed memory of going into the Palestinian refugee camps of the 1982 war against Lebanon, where the Israelis stood back and the Lebanese Phalangist forces massacred the refugees in the camps. Obviously, anything that comes out of that area is political, but this was a good mix of the political and the personal.

Cannes Director’s Fortnight Tribute

Another one of the new strands is part of our close connection with Cannes. Every year we go to the Cannes festival – and our timing is lucky. It allows us to go to Cannes, come back, and have three weeks to get some of the best Cannes titles. This year, we have 29 titles. We also have a deeper connection with Cannes in that this year: we’re celebrating a part of their program.

Director’s Fortnight was set up as a counter to the black-tie swishery and the official awards as a champion of auteur films and a champion of new voices, new cultural zeitgeist in the late 60s. Cannes was suspended for a year in 1968, after the student riots and general unrest. And when it came back in 1969, Director’s Fortnight was set up. This year is 40 years of Director’s Fortnight. And this year, along with a lot of other festivals, we’re doing our own independent celebration of Director’s Fortnight. A kind of homage, if you like. We’re including a couple of films from Director’s Fortnight this year, and also some of the classics from among the 600 odd titles that have premiered Director’s Fortnight over the years. They’ve championed filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese, and many others.

Retrospective on George Romero

We’re doing a big tribute to George Romero this year. It’s been 40 years since he revolutionised horror films with that film of his, Night of the Living Dead. We’re showing the Australian premiere of his new film, Diary of a Dead. And we’re doing a tribute to George as part of it. George is coming out, along with his daughter Tina, also a filmmaker, and we’re showing about nine of his films across the course of the festival. He’ll be one of our major guests. There will be a lot of focus on his commercial zombie films, but he’s also important as a somewhat neglected figure of independent American cinema, with films like Martin and Nightriders, which are not part of the series of zombie films but are still very important and interesting social allegories.

Tribute to Edward Yang

The festival’s other tribute is to Edward Yang, a Taiwanese filmmaker who is acknowledged as one of the people who started off Taiwanese cinema. He died at the end of last year. We’re screening all seven of Edward Yang’s features, including the four-hour film A Brighter Sunday. It’s rare that you’ll get to see all those films in one place anywhere. And without going into hyperbole, it’s really one of the best collections of film that anyone’s produced in South-East Asia in the last many years.

There’s a really strong Australian presence this year. Is this something you plan to keep doing for future festivals?

It really depends. Every year you go out with certain ideas. You know, we go ‘let’s do a selection of Japanese porno movies from the 1960s’. But then, you soon realise when you go out there and try to secure these things or try to find them, that it’s not necessarily going to be easy to deliver those strands. Either the print is not available or some widow is holding onto her husband’s feature films and they’re all under her bed and she won’t let them go for various reasons. So, for some obscure reason you can’t always deliver what you think you’re going to do.

So, to go back to your question, yes, MIFF is always strong on Australian films, as most Australian film festivals are, but this year, it just all came together – with the advent of the MIFF Premiere Fund, plus the B-grade exploitation films, plus the usual Home-Grown program, we ended up having a really large contingent of Aussie movies. So, yes, we’re really happy about that.

Going back to what you were saying about the Border Patrol films on Israel/Palestine, were you aiming for that mix of the political and the personal that you’ve captured?

Yes. I think that’s something I’m personally attracted to, in films across the board. This year, we’ve got some very, very strong political documentaries in our doco section. There are three titles in particular.

One is called Terror’s Advocate, by Barbet Schroeder, and it’s a portrait of probably the most morally ambiguous character in the whole festival: French/Algerian lawyer called Jacques Vergès, who was defending the Algerian freedom fighters (the Algerian resistance movement), but then went on to defend Carlos the Jackal. He married a member of the Baider Menhof gang and made a name for himself with the Palestinians as well. It’s fascinating and he’s an absolutely fascinating character. It also becomes a history of revolutionary movements from the 1960s up to now.

Another is called It’s Hard Being Loved By Jerks, which is about the court case fought by a small left-wing Paris magazine called Charlie Hebdo. They fought against the grand mosque and Islam and various other organisations in Paris to defend their right to republish those Danish cartoons [a cartoon of a weeping Prophet Muhammad with a speech bubble saying ‘It’s hard being loved by jerks’.] And it’s set inside the magazine itself and takes place over the course of the trail.

The third political documentary I’m really excited about is called Yakasuni. It’s the name of the shrine built in honour of the Japanese war dead. If you’ve watched the news lately, you’ve probably seen the Japanese prime minister when he went to worship at the shrine he caused an absolute furore, because there are all these people in Japan and China and various places, who accuse the Japanese of being complete militarists. And the director of this documentary had to go into hiding and faced death threats by the Yakuza, etcetera, etcetera.

So, they’re three really strong documentaries. I think they are films that upset people, or make people have strong passions, or give rise to strong emotions.

There are quite a few films this year with links to books. What are some of the stand-outs in that area?

There are a few connected with literary themes. There’s a documentary on Dalton Trombo, one of Hollywood’s greatest screenwriters (Roman Holiday, Spartacus, The Brave One), who had a very strong political background. He went before the Un-American Committee and refused to name names and then was banned and blacklisted, but continued to write films for various Hollywood directors. In fact, one of his pseudonyms was Robert Rich, and he won an Oscar under that name for The Brave One. It’s an extremely comprehensive documentary about his life and career.

There’s one on the experimental playwright Kathy Acker (Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker?). She had a real connection to the literary underground in the late 60s and early 70s in New York and a really close affiliation with the punk movement, drawing on her background as a stripper, too. She died of breast cancer in 1997, and this is about her life and work.

There is one based on a very popular vampire novel called Let the Right One in by John Lindquist. It’s about the love affair between an adolescent and a 200-year-old vampire who is still in the form of a child. It’s not a blood and guts kind of vampire movie, but much more of a psychological thriller. It’s terrific.

There’s a piece called Persepolis based on the graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi about her experiences growing up in Iran. This is the animation that makes that whole story come to life. I know this film was huge in France.

We have another documentary on the life and times of Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzo. There’s a lot of good stuff, there.

Last question … what’s the best thing about your job?

The drink after the opening night speech. Definitely.