Still some of the finest films

One of the great things about the Australian Film Institute Awards is that during the build up to the awards night people actually start talking about Australian cinema and the industry gets a bit of media attention. The bad thing is that this has increasingly resulted in a stack of inaccurate and unfair criticism being thrown at Australian cinema for it being too miserable and not mainstream enough. Whether in the comments found under articles about the industry or in the actual articles themselves, too many people love to characterise Australian cinema as arty doom and gloom stories set in the inner city. This is apparently the reason Australians don’t go to see Australian films.

This time last year I started writing a piece that was eventually titled “Some of the finest films”, published in issue 1999 of Overland Literary Journal and then posted online here by Overland and here by myself. The thrust of my argument was that the industry is significantly suffering do to the perception that Australia only makes worthy dramas. This prevalent perception is simply not true but that doesn’t stop uninformed commentators dismissing everything this country produces as doom and gloom.

There is a place in any healthy national cinema for challenging social-realists films, especially those that give a voice to the marginalised, and Australia makes its share of such films but they don’t typify the current industry. This year alone has seen the release of a diverse collection of films including Bran Nue Dae (musical), Daybreakers (horror/action), Beneath Hill 60 (war), I Love You Too (romantic comedy), Animal Kingdom (crime drama), The Horseman (revenge thriller), The Loved Ones (horror/comedy), Tomorrow, When The War Began (teen action) and Red Hill (action/western).

Not everybody is going to like every film that Australia produces and it’s unrealistic to expect every film to be a hit. Our industry caters to a broad range of audiences, but the intense negativity and lack of support means that frequently those films don’t always reach those intended audiences. This has been recently demonstrated with the poor levels of interest in The Loved Ones and Red Hill, which according to many commentators are supposedly exactly the types of genre films that Australia should be making more of.

The knee-jerk reaction that Australia only produces depressing films is unfounded and unfairly puts people off seeing films that deserve to be seen.

Written for the Oz Film Blogathon hosted by Dark Habits