During the Sundance Film Festival Universal Cinema Film & TV Journal’s Amir Ganjavie interviewed Al Cossar the Artistic Director for the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF). What follows is part of that interview.
Amir Ganjavie, UniversalCinema Magazine (UM): Can you tell us a little about your festival?
Al Cossar (AC): The festival that’s actually one of the largest in the world. We celebrated our 70th Anniversary year, and the program in a non-pandemic affected year is around 370 plus films across 18 days. And there are a number of parts to what we do at the festival. There’s a massive sort of public screening program. There is also a market called the 37º South Market. There are also a number of talent developmental campuses, including the Accelerator [Lab], which is geared at short filmmakers who are emerging into feature film production and includes alumni such as Taika Waititi, David Michôd, Justin Kurzel, and Sophie Hyde. Some really exciting voices in there, as well as Critics Campus, which is coming into its 10th anniversary this year.
And that’s again, a talent developmental campus, which brings out international mentors as well as mentors from across Australia to work with eight selected participants who use the festival as a training ground in terms of starting to develop and build a kind of a professional thru-line to the world of film criticism. And that’s a really exciting part of what we do in terms of encouraging a professional culture of response to cinema.
We program in Melbourne. We use around nine to ten cinemas in the CBD, as well as the IMAX and planetarium. We have a suburban ring, and we tour to nine country centers across the state of Victoria here in Australia. We have around 150 to 180 guests each year.
It is a massive festival that takes over Melbourne for nearly three weeks every year. It’s a hugely exciting festival. My role is to oversee the curatorial side of the public program. We have a shared kind of senior management team which is myself, an industry director who manages the market, a commercial operations director, and a finance manager. I joined the organization in terms of paid staff in 2011. But I had been a volunteer for it for a year or two prior to that. My role was as a programmer and then had different iterations, acting artistic director, when my boss was on maternity leave, associate artistic director, and then into the artistic director role in September 2018.
I’ve been with the organization for quite a while now, and I’ve worked with other screen culture settings in Australia prior to that as well, including Flickerfest, which is based in Sydney. Worked in public programs at Acme, the Australian Center for the Moving Image, as well as program director for the Portable Film Festival as a programmer, and board member for the Human Rights Arts Film Festival. And my background prior to that, was working in editing and as an assistant post-production supervisor of a film and television in New Zealand as well. I’m originally from Auckland. I moved to Australia in 2004. So yeah, this is my what, 12th, 13th year at the festival in some capacity.
And so there’s been huge shifts across that time in terms of the city, in terms of our audience, in terms of the transition to digital and transition to streaming and the impact of COVID. There’s been such flux and such change and such volatility in the last few years in the space that we work. In terms of being a very large-scale festival with a history of seven decades, I think the last few years had been a very unique opportunity in the history of what Miff is to think about what it has to be if it couldn’t be the thing that people expect it to be. And to begin with sort of radically reinventing it for those times. Our adage has really been meeting audiences where they are over that COVID period and taking the kind of learnings from that and applying them into what the shape of the festival is going forward.
And the COVID situation in Australia has been very, very impactful. Melbourne at one point became the most locked-down city in the world. And so, there is impact from that operationally and downstream and long tail, as well as audience behavior, all kinds of complexity which, are new to us, and which we have done our best to creatively and thoughtfully respond to in the program and the way we think about audience and the way that we overall deliver a festival as well. Those sort of fundamental, look yourself for the mirror questions, as in “Who are we?” “What do we do and who is it for?”
(UM): Who makes the final decisions on programming?
(AC):We have a fairly small festival team for a big program. It’s myself, as the head of the programming team, which is around five people, and then we are supported by teams of viewers and panelists, who have different expertise and work across different fields.
Some areas we collaborate on. Some are led by [the] programmers themselves in terms of films that are placed. We obviously talk very, very, closely. And one of the things about having a small team and a big program is that you can look at things through a bird’s eye view, at a macro level, and think curatorially about how the pieces of the puzzle connect together and how they make meaning and resonance at the form of the whole scale.
When we program, we’re never programming the level of an individual film. We’re always programming as parts of our parts of a whole. Our program has headline strand, headliners, which the latest sort of festival blockbusters. There’s an international strand, there’s documentary, there’s animation, there’s horror, and genre works.
There’s a competition that we launched last year as a major new program initiative, which we are very excited about. It’s called Bright Horizons. It was the first year in 2022, and it was brought in sort of in sync with our 70th anniversary. It’s specifically geared towards first and second time filmmakers, so emerging filmmakers, but really amplifying that moment of sort-of breakthrough and discovery in terms of the world of festivals and cinema culture. There were 11 films in that last year. And titles, I’m sure you’ll be well aware of, there were films like Tom Wright’s The Stranger. There was Alena Lodkina’s Petrol in terms of Australian films. There was Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun. There were 11 films, all with most filmmakers in attendance, and a really top-notch jury working as well.
(UM): What is your festivals approach with current drive for diversity?
(AC): I think at the scale of which we work 370 films, there’s no reason why you can’t produce and curate a program [that] is hugely diverse, and of substantial quality as well. I don’t think these things are in separate categories at all. And I think the way we do it is that we’re naturally sort of collaborative. There are a number of organizations we’ve worked with before. We have every kind of established database. We are very proactive in terms of that discovery factor. And we are very conscious of how the pieces of our puzzle work together. The other thing I’ll say as well as an activity within MIFF, and one that I think is very much geared towards diversity is that we actually act as a minority co-financer to a slate of films that emerge from Victoria, Australia every year. Potentially 5-11films. It’s called The Premier Fund. And so there have been a number of amazing films. And in fact, one [from that fund] is Shayda at Sundance [this year].
(UM): And in terms of gender, is there a quota?
(AC): We don’t do quotas. We’re obviously very proactive to ensure that there is proper representation and screen representation through the festival. We achieved 50%, gender parity, [half the films directed by women], in 2020. Outside of that, we’ve sat sort of between around 38 to 50%.
(UM): Are there any kinds of films, subjects, you can’t program?
(AC): We don’t have anything explicit in terms of our programming protocols, but I would say that anything which we would perceive to breach a line in terms of promoting hate or misinformation would be a line in the sand to us. But then there would also need to be an internal review and discussion about whether that was a justifiable perspective or not. Yeah, I mean, a festival is certainly a setting where difficult conversations can be had and where different points of view, can be retained, can be explored. It’s, as I say, it’s 370 films, it’s 70 to 80 countries. It’s a variety of cultural representations and formal elements of storytelling and more challenging and difficult and demanding subject matter than you get in any sort of commercial setting.
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