ADELAIDE FILM FESTIVAL

Ms FOX (Bright) (14:50): My question is to the Minister for the Arts.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! I can't hear the member. Member for Bright.

Ms FOX: Thank you, Madam Speaker. My question is to the Minister for the Arts. Can the Premier update the house on the forthcoming film industry events to be held in Adelaide?

The Hon. M.D. RANN (Ramsay—Premier, Minister for Economic Development, Minister for Social Inclusion, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Sustainability and Climate Change) (14:50): I want to thank the honourable member for Bright for her great interest in and passion for the arts.

An honourable member interjecting:

The Hon. M.D. RANN: Was that from Harpo? From 24 February to 6 March, Adelaide will host the fifth biennial BigPond Adelaide Film Festival. This event continues to break new ground and to explore and celebrate the many forms of the moving image.

This festival has carved a distinctive place in the Australian film landscape and this year offers its most ambitious program, with Australian features, documentaries and shorts, alongside world cinema. There will be cross-platform works, incorporating video installations, as well as online and mobile phone activities. This festival attracts international guests, and this year will bring many eminent guests to Adelaide, including festival programmers from around the globe and from each of the major Australian film festivals and film corporations.

The Adelaide Film Festival was groundbreaking in the establishment of the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund—I think that was a moment of genius. Not only does the festival program show films but it also invests in the creation of films. Very few of the 1,500 film festivals in the world (several years ago, I knew of only one other) actually invests in every single step of the creative process. Most film festivals screen other people's films; our film festival makes films.

The state government provides $1 million over two years to the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund for each film festival. This fund was set up in 2003 to support established and emerging Australian film makers. Since the inception of this fund, we have seen investments in 46 Australian projects, including 14 feature films, nine feature documentaries, 18 short films and five cross-platform projects. A number of these films have gone on to great success, the most notable being Sarah Watt's Look Both Ways having won the Discovery Award at the Toronto Film Festival; Rolf de Heer's Ten Canoes winning special jury mention, Un Certain Regard, at the Cannes Film Festival; and, of course, Warwick Thornton's Samson and Delilah, winner of the Camera D'Or (or best first feature film) at Cannes in 2009.

In fact, with those films, we saw almost a clean sweep of AFI awards, with the first films our film festival produced. Just like in previous years, including Samson and Delilah, I am sure that some of the films in this year's festival, including Snowtown, will be both confronting and challenging.

Premiering at this year's festival are no fewer than 14 new investment fund projects—bold and sweeping in their content, style and format—that have been funded through this initiative. Let me go through some of them. Shut Up Little Man, produced by Sophie Hyde and Matthew Bate, Danger Five, a series of six previous webisodes from the team behind Italian Spiderman, and Snowtown, directed by Gawler-born Justin Kurzel, and dealing with difficult subject matter, are just a few of the investment fund films that are premiering at this year's film festival.

Shut up Little Man and Danger Five are excellent examples of quality films made by local talent. Danger Five is also included in the Made in SA program. Presented in partnership with the South Australian Film Corporation, Made in SA demonstrates the wealth of talent emerging in the South Australian film sector.

It is exciting to note (and I can feel the excitement) that in April 2011, New York's Museum of Modern Art, known to the minister assisting and I as MOMA, will be screening a week-long program of some of the films that this fund has supported. It is testament to the quality and international standing of the BigPond Adelaide Film Festival and investment fund that an institution of such global repute should choose to showcase our product—started here, begun here, produced here and developed here.

At the launch of the festival program on 28 January, minister Hill announced that the recipient of this festival's Don Dunstan Award, in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the Australian film industry, will be the amazingly talented actor Judy Davis, and I look forward to presenting Ms Davis with the award on opening night.

This year the BigPond Adelaide Film Festival will screen films and support installations and projections at locations all over the state; in cinemas, theatres, galleries, and even on the cliffs at Port Willunga beach. The program includes an impressive 20 world premieres, including Life in Movement by Adelaide filmmakers Brian Mason and Sophie Hyde, Magic Harvest by Adelaide filmmakers Jeni Lee and Julia D'Roeper, which celebrates wonderful community food projects that are running in and around Noarlunga (so I hope that the minister for food will be there, as well as the member for Mawson), and also, screening in competition at the festival, Here I am, directed by Beck Cole and filmed in and around Port Adelaide.

We are looking forward not only to the film festival but also to the Australian Directors' Guild Conference and the Adelaide International Documentary Conference, also occurring here in Adelaide. I want to thank Cheryl Bart, the chair of the Adelaide Film Festival and chair of the South Australian Film Corporation, and her board. I also particularly want to thank the vision of Katrina Sedgwick, our inaugural and continuing festival director, for the amazing job she has done in making this festival into what has been described as one of the world's 'not to be missed' film festivals.