To celebrate its sixty years, the Sydney Film Festival has built an 84 page history and archive of itself, laced with interesting essays by stimulating people. This is just one, in which Dr Greg Dolgopolov considers the wider landscape of boutique festivals, most of them built around national cinemas. He should know, since is is a key creator of the Russian Resurrection Film Festival.
Sydney is remarkable for the many national, ethnic, religious, transnational, short, community and specialist film festivals that are now held every year, the number and range of which have exploded over the past 10 years. More than 40 ethnic and 20 specialist film festivals take place every year; together with Sydney Film Festival they provide an annual calendar bulging with filmgoing activity. Seven new festivals started in 2012: the Lebanese, Persian, Polish, Argentine, and Macedonian events, and even the Cat Video Film Festival. Together with the emergence of the Blackfella Films component now part of SFF, does this raise a question about the sustainability of such film-festival growth? And does the rate of proliferation of ethnic and specialist film festivals, together with the continuing growth of SFF, raise issues of event saturation – even bringing into question the future of the film festival format?
