Image: The Death and Life of Otto Bloom
The launch of the 65th Melbourne International Film Festival went off with the usual panache, as Hamer Hall bent its stuffy, shiny head to accomodate a horde of film tragics busting for seventeen days of paradise.
All we needed was buckets and spades and cossies in bags and it would have felt like the first night of the summer holidays. The speeches for this event are very difficult to write, and politicians and sponsors know we are too polite to make trouble so there is a certain want of discipline in their presentations. But audiences at this moment don’t mind, because it feels like standing in a long queue by the Mr Whippy truck.
