If a documentary represents a kind of picture of the world at a particular time and place, then CEO of Screen Australia, Dr. Ruth Harley, took the opportunity in one of the first sessions at this year’s Australian International Documentary Festival to have a look at what kind of snapshots her organisation helped create in 2012.
Presentations from agency representatives can be dry affairs, full of policy points, charts, and morsels of data distilled down into factoids. So it was a refreshing change for Dr. Harley to mostly eschew the wonky bits, and focus on getting a sense of what the 2012 slate of Screen Australia-supported documentaries has to say about who Australians think they are, as reflected in that medium.
