Beige is not the word I would use to describe Sydney Underground Film Festival, nor it’s Festival Director; Stefan Popescu. I had the pleasure of chatting with Stefan about Sydney Underground Film Festival 2020, a digital curation of oddball arthouse shorts that defy boundaries, are controversial to controversialists and highlight the colourful obscurities within our current world, a ‘hyperreal’ world.
Laneikka: First off, I think what you guys do at Sydney Underground Film Festival is really freaking cool. I feel like some of SUFF’s films would be ignored by other film festivals for how unique and non-conventional they are… is that what sparked the first Sydney Underground Film Festival?
Stefan: Yes, it’s kind of exactly what you’re saying. In 2007, Katherine and I (co-festival director of SUFF) had our first Sydney Underground Film Festival. At the time, the film scene was super conservative in Sydney and I can’t remember what film, but we were like “oh, surely that’ll come to Sydney Film Festival” and when we found out it wasn’t and a bunch of film festivals were threatening to shut down, we realised we couldn’t get any good arthouse films at these festivals. There was no infrastructure for even arthouse, let alone experimental or really marginal work. Katherine and I both studied film and we were like “why don’t we start a film festival?” and then we started it on a whim.
Because we were into experimental film, we also realised there was no way to get funding for experimental film because the Arts Council tells you to go to Screen Australia and Screen Australia tells you to go to the Arts Council. We knew a lot of filmmakers who were feeling this strain and we wanted to provide a platform for their work. We took a gamble on these artists and thank God Factory Theatre took a gamble on our festival because that’s where it all began, on a complete whim with no idea what we were doing in the beginning.
Laneikka: I think that says a lot about SUFF though, it’s not a money making venture, it’s a festival made by artists, for artists.
Stefan: SUFF is very grassroots which has been our saving grace, even in such a challenging year.
Laneikka: Could you tell us more about the challenges of putting on a film festival midst COVID?
Stefan: We really had to change our mindset about how the festival would work, especially when going digitally, people interact with digital mediums differently. When you go to a cinema, there’s an implicit contract that you buy a ticket and are pretty much going to sit there for an hour and a half, unless the guy eating too loudly really bugs you but online you can flick anywhere. When you’re programming a 90 minute short film session you have to think about placement; if you have a really horrible, sort of challenging film, you don’t normally put that right at the front, you need to lure people into a false sense of security and then when you put it in, apologise with a nice, quirky film to comfort them.
Screening a digital festival also made it impossible to include any feature films in the SUFF programming. When screening a feature film in a cinema it’s easier to access rights for a one off screening, but online rights are usually sold to Stan or Netflix before the film is released and it’s not even the distributors you have to ask, it’s the people who sold the rights to the distributor. It’s nightmare-ish and that’s why we decided to keep it to short films this year.
Who knows, we might incorporate an online element in future festivals, but it’ll be really interesting to see how it all pans out.
Laneikka: So, what does make a SUFF film?
Stefan: Good question. Simplistically, it should be pushing some sort of boundary and experimenting in some way. Whether it’s challenging via narrative, aesthetics, politically or in terms of audiences morals and ethics, it should be doing something different. That’s what perks us up when we programme, we watch stuff and think “whoa, that was out there. I’ve never thought about that or seen that before” and that’s what we programme. We consider ourselves a discovery festival, not a genre festival repeating the same stuff, we want to constantly offer new work and celebrate the talented artists who create it. Since 2007 our popularity has constantly grown and I think that’s to do with the digital world. People only want to get out the door for something they’re not going to get anywhere else, not just something they can watch on Netflix.
Laneikka: And SUFF’s line up is definitely not something you could watch on Netflix! Can you tell us more about what’s in store for us at Sydney Underground Film Festival this year?
Stefan: There’s lots of depravity, as usual. Lots of comedy, it’s all very entertaining. I’ve got two favourite sessions: Reality Bites, a series of short documentaries, we had so many good submissions, it was hard to pick! And the second is WTF shorts, literally every film in this line up is entertaining but you don’t know why. It’s perfect to get stoned and watch, that actually might help you make sense of it all…
We also have Take 48 which is something that was introduced last year and was so successful we thought we had to bring it back this year.
Laneikka: How does the Take 48 Challenge work?
Stefan: Any filmmaker or groups of filmmakers can participate by going to the SUFF website and signing up. As soon as the 48 hours start, you’re given an object and a line of dialogue that must be included in the film, the film must be submitted at the end of the forty eight hours. I also forgot to mention we have a screen conference as well, which is more of an academic thing but we like to host SUFF like that; part weirdo films and part academic so we can contextualise the work.
Laneikka: What are some films in the program you would recommend for a younger audience?
Stefan: Oh, definitely all of them! Ha. If we’re talking about younger audiences, millennials and stuff, The WTF shorts are very much up their alley. They’re all films where, you know, you don’t need logic, you just find stuff funny for whatever reason.
Laneikka: And what was the first film you saw that made you fall in love with cinema?
Stefan: The one I want to tell you, definitely isn’t a film I fell in love with, but it’s the one that affected me the most and made me realise the power of cinema… I Spit on Your Grave it’s full on. When I was younger my brother was really sadistic, it’s probably why I don’t talk to him anymore. When he was 14 and I was 7 he became obsessed with sort of 80s, extreme horror, you know, like Halloween, and he didn’t want to watch it on his own so he would make me, his seven year old brother, watch these films with him. And he made me what I spit on your grave, which completely scarred me. And that’s why I didn’t want to say it was a film I fell in love with because it was more about dealing with it and a fascination with working out what am I experiencing here and then realising it was all fake but how much a film can still affect you.
Laneikka: You probably have some cinematic PTSD after watching that.
Stefan: Haha. I definitely do. But it was actually a positive experience with my mother because she’d sit down after the film and break down cinema for me which sort of helped me get into cinema by realising it’s an artform, a medium that we can use to affect people.
Laneikka: And I think you’re really doing that. For me, Sydney Underground Film Festival is a pioneer in the discussion of diversity in film. How would you define diversity and what role do you think SUFF has played in that conversation?
Stefan: We’ve always made a real effort to screen diverse stories for audiences. For example, we were screening stuff about police brutality against the African American community before Black Lives Matter was in the news. We definitely are trying to give a voice to those marginalised communities because, you know, you’re measured by the worst bits of your society.
Laneikka: What would be your advice to emerging filmmakers?
Stefan: Stick in there, you’ve picked the worst profession ever, the most incestuous, run by cronies and old networks. But stick in there because on the flip side, there are new platforms and opportunities where new voices need to be heard. I believe the boundaries between the so called mainstream and marginalised are eroding really quickly and if you’ve honed your craft enough, you’ll definitely get a platform.
Laneikka: And finally, what do you think is in store for the future of cinema?
Stefan: We’re already experiencing storytelling that’s mutating, the world’s reality feels like fiction and it’s merging together to create this hyperreal world. I think film in the future is going to be really interesting and vastly different but it’s hard to speculate exactly how storytelling will evolve.
Thank you Stefan, it has been an absolute pleasure speaking with you and I cannot wait to see all the “weirdo films” Sydney Underground Film Festival has in store for us!
Sydney Underground Film Festival
10 – 20 September