Festival director's report: Sydney underground film festival – a community of cinema junkies

Abstract

The Sydney Underground Film Festival (commonly known as SUFF) was conceived by Katherine Berger and myself, with the inaugural festival taking place in 2007. How do you go about building a festival of marginal cinema in today's cinematic climate? What strategies did we use to develop our community and audience? What was the significance of the partnerships we formed across the film, education and business sectors to form and engage the local community through the exhibition of daring, experimental and provocative cinema? What is the importance of extra-filmic events – talks and so on – at our festival? What kinds of non-traditional methods have we used in festival organization, financing and programming, and what auxiliary activities in the realm of film distribution have we ventured into? And has SUFF managed to shift film culture in Sydney in the way that we would like to? This brief report opens up on these issues and more, sharing our experiences with organizing and running the SUFF over the last seven years.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Stefan Popescu is a filmmaker; he has written and directed four feature films since 2007 – Rosebery 7470 (2007), Nude Study (2010), Zombie Massacre 3 (2014) and The Performance Artist (in post-production). Having completed his Ph.D. in Film and Digital Art in 2007, he is also an academic at Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney University. He published his first book entitled Material Affects: The Body Language of Film in 2010. Stefan is also interested in emerging, alternate and marginal forms in cinema and is currently one of the directors of the SUFF.