Giving Culture spent the day at the Sydney Film Festival on Saturday, and we were lucky enough to see Monster, the new film from Shoplifters director Kore-eda Hirokazu. Not only was it great to be amongst the first in Australia to see a film as complex and layered as this; soaking up the atmosphere with a venue full of avid film-goers is so much more than going to a regular suburban screening.
The audience response throughout the film, and the shared sense of tension and concentration that you feel around you in the theatre is what makes an event like the Sydney Film Festival so special. Sitting down for a cup of coffee and pastry before the screening in the overly ornate and decadent Parlour Cucina next door, then walking down the red carpet into the State Theatre is also just as much part of the experience!
After lunch we relocated to the Ritz Cinemas in Randwick for a couple of screenings. While the films we saw weren’t in the same class as Monster, once again being amongst a group of avid movie lovers in the 1930s Art Deco grandeur of the Ritz was a fabulous experience in itself. It’s a testament to the power of cinema that both the 90-year-old Ritz and the 70-year-old Sydney Film Festival have continued to go from strength to strength and play such an important role in Sydney’s cultural fabric.
We used a Flexipass 10 pass to buy our tickets, which we had redeemed through a Giving Culture Silver voucher. The process from original redemption to booking tickets for our films was all completed online and seamless. The Sydney Film Festival website user interface made it so easy to review the screenings available to us on the Saturday, and we loved the SFF’s Planner feature, which allowed you to save your preferred films and screening times, but also included each film’s running time, so you could make sure there was no overlap.
In terms of event organisation, the whole experience was outstanding. However, if there’s one piece of feedback we could give, it would be to film-makers who seem to be favouring quantity of quality. Do films really need to run for two-and-a-half to three-plus hours?
We seem to have lost the art of the tight edit in story-telling, a point made in a recent article from The Guardian (Guys, length isn’t everything when it comes to film-making):
There’s a theory that, in the age of TikTok, the collective attention span is shrinking. Is expecting punters to sit through more than three hours the best way to lure post-pandemic audiences back into cinemas?
One thing about long films is that it’s very hard to schedule in multiple screenings when you have just one day available to go to the festival!