RealityNext

20-25 June, 2006

You have to love it when a plan comes together!

It’s a fascinating process putting together a festival like MIAF. And the Director collects the best and worst of those moments.

Some moments are irreplacible gems. Finding oneself standing in a tiny workshop surrounded by puppets – past, present and future stars of one of the finest puppet animation studios in the world qualifies as such a gem. Being casually asked – as a coffee cup is slid into ones hands – if I’d be interested in seeing their very latest film even though it’s “not quite finished yet” is even better. But putting that film up on the big screen here and now is best of all. will be a personal highlight of MIAF 06 for me.

Other moments are simple, singular moments of triumph. Such as the day I opened an email from one of my animating heroes. Peter Chung - an artist who’s animated 1990’s series drove a stake through the heart of my over-Disneyed early conceptions of what animation was capable of - was saying “Yes, MIAF can play a selection of the series and, by the way, these are my favourite episodes”. Simple as that. Wish I’d asked years ago.

And sometimes there is a moment ….. a silent drumroll of a moment ….. when a plan just simply comes together. Eight months out and I have a mish mash of ideas for the MIAF 06 line-up in my mind. I am captivated by the notion of a program curated around the aesthetic and I’ve got a box of tapes and a journal of notes that might turn into something. I am more or less constantly surrounded by a debate about the role and value of computer animation vs ‘hand-made’ animation. I am sitting in a beer garden at a festival in Ottawa wondering if it’s maybe just cold enough to give this table up. I am introduced to , a filmmaker who’s name I instantly match to a collection of extraordinarily memorable films. Within five minutes I find myself being fearlessly, fulsomely lectured – me!! – on the absolute need to preserve animation (and cinema) as an artform first and foremost. #@*&#< #!

You’ll enjoy meeting . The final shape and form of MIAF 06 owes much to that chilly afternoon encounter. is a CG animator of extraordinary vision and skill. His films are adaptations of his graphic novel. His views perfectly match the ethos of MIAF. Clearly, the program was on! Other possibilities gradually emerged. Pressure had been building to include more talks and learning experiences into MIAF. I was certain that was the ideal choice to get that ball rolling and, hence, the ‘’ series makes it debute this year.

For a long time I had been wanting to find a way to better intregrate and contextualise abstract animation in the Festival. A chance comment by a colleague led me to a vast archive of experimental films in Paris dating back to the beginning of cinema. The generous hospitality of the staff there made it easy to imagine a one-off screening of some of the most important films in the genre. If the old, why not the new, I thought. The outcome... '' program and the newest addition to the international sessions, ''.

These are the moments that build a festival.

A note from the desk of the MIAF Director of Exports outlines that it’s also been a pretty good year for sending Australian animation out into the big, wide world. MIAF has been asked to curate and screen programs in places like Rome, Istanbul, Los Angeles and Seoul. Looking forward, there are offers to do much the same thing in Romania, Taiwan, Hungary and Canada.

And in the meantime, the tapes and dvds roll in. We received more than 1500 submissions for MIAF 06 and – somehow – we managed to boil those down to what you will see in the competitive screenings. We are already receiving submissions for next year. It is – most definitely - a very vibrant and vital artform.

Malcolm Turner
Director – Melbourne International Animation Festival