The Opening Night film at the 18th Byron Bay International Film Festival is Aquarius, a feature-length documentary about a defining event in the history of the Northern Rivers region.
The 1973 Aquarius Festival was a ten-day cultural art and music gathering in Nimbin where clothing was strictly optional. It transformed the sleepy dairy and banana growing community and its surrounds into the free-thinking region that’s still known for today for alternative vibes and political activism – Byron Baes not withstanding.
Sub-titled ‘Dreamers, Tree-huggers and Radical Ratbags’, Aquarius is produced by Sam Griffin and directed by local filmmaker Wendy Champagne. The film documents and celebrates the 10,000 people who descended on the sleepy hinterland township in 1973 and introduced new ideas and behaviours – not all of them welcome, like drug use, free love and hedonism – bringing with them a revolutionary agenda.
Many of these newcomers stayed and contributed to burgeoning environmental, anti-war, Aboriginal rights and feminist movements, giving the Northern Rivers a reputation as a haven of social and cultural free-thinking.
Anything is possible: Byron Bay Film Festival
The theme of this year’s week-long Byron Bay International Film Festival, which celebrates local and Australian films as well as those from further afar, is ‘Anything is possible’. The festival’s director, J’aimee Skippon-Volke says: ‘The Aquarius documentary is the perfect Opening Night film, celebrating what makes the rainbow region so special.
‘At a time when many local people feel that our sense of community has been diminished, I believe our festival serves as a vital focal point, bringing us together to explore what matters, support our creative community, and reconnect.’
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Back in 1973, the Aquarius Festival’s director was Graeme Dunstan, who is still a resident in the area. He says the event ‘attracted visionaries and prophets, pioneers, who could see the vision and knew how to work for it, and also the people who wanted to be saved, people who were falling and wanted a new kind of community to live in.’
The documentary’s director, Wendy Champagne, is also a Byron Shire resident. An award-winning writer and filmmaker, Champagne’s previous film BAS! Beyond the Red Light, a study of child-trafficking, opened the Byron Bay Film Festival in 2010.
Champagne says that to make Aquarius, she spent three years finding storytellers and gathering and stitching together archival footage to chronicle the excitement and chaos of the student-led festival and its activist lead-up.
‘The film pays tribute to them, and to protest,’ Champagne says, and ‘shows what can be achieved with audacity, a strong community and a little bit of crazy.’ She hopes to inspire a younger audience who are facing the same issues as previous generations of protestors, and one of the Festival’s legacies which is covered in the film is the mass turn-out of local environmental foot soldiers in opposition to the fracking corporations at Bentley 40 years later – a people-powered victory that embodied the highest values of the nature-loving Nimbin crowd.
Sam Griffin, the producer of Aquarius, says the documentary was partly a reaction to the shallow Netflix series Byron Baes, along with the 50th anniversary of the original Aquarius festival, and executive producer and ‘bit of an old hippie’ Chris Hilton connecting with the like-minded director.
Aquarius is written by Karin Steininger and Wendy Champagne, edited by Steininger, shot by Justine Kerrigan, with a score by Damien Lane.
The documentary screened recently at MIFF and CinefestOz and will get a cinema release with Madman from 14 November.
The Byron Bay International Film Festival (BBFF) takes place from 18 to 27 October 2024. Full program to be announced soon.
