Film buffs find a new home in Brunswick
The inaugural Brunswick Underground Film Festival will highlight non-mainstream movies
THREE Brunswick West venues will be transformed into cinemas this weekend for the inaugural Brunswick Underground Film Festival (BUFF), which aims to unite Melbourne/Naarm’s counter cultural film making scene and bring film buffs to the inner north suburb.
The festival, which has largely been organised by a team of three Brunswick residents, seeks to promote “underground” films – those which in either content or production are not “mainstream”, or what BUFF’s manifesto describes as “the down and dirty” – to a wider audience.
Expect films that are trashy, cult, schlock and forward thinking.
The three-day program presents 36 films across a trio of screens in the same Melville Road block, most notably a heavily restored Estonian House, a former cinema which has retained its mezzanine seating from the glory days of cinema.
Inspired by the pre-Covid Sydney Underground Film Festival, which heavily emphasised the Factory Theatre, Enmore’s courtyard space, the BUFF team wanted to “let the venues really dictate the festival”, said festival director Felix Hubble.
“This year we’re really focusing on establishing our identity,” said Hubble, whose day job is as a film classifier.
He said the festival team had chosen to focus primarily on retrospective titles, including underground classics such as the Jackass trilogy, Frankenhooker, and Paris Is Burning to set the tone for its inaugural year.
“We think it’s a really nice and diverse program,” Hubble said, adding that despite the fact that some films will not appeal to all audiences, the team wanted to highlight films which are “coming from a place of transgressive provocation”.
Hubble said as the festival grew in future years, the BUFF team had ambitions to integrate it further with the large Brunswick film making community.
“Ongoing we definitely want to keep that [local] focus”, Hubble said.
“Next year we really want to add a symposium … [to provide] a series of talks about the state of the industry [and] bring in people who’ve lived through previous waves of underground film.”
Hubble also aims to open the program to submissions, planning for every submission to receive feedback, which most film festivals don’t offer.
Films screening at BUFF include (from top) Jackass: The Movie, Paris is Burning, Frankenhooker, The Code and IKU.
Films screening at BUFF include (clockwise from top) Jackass: The Movie, Paris is Burning, Frankenhooker, The Code and IKU.
Five of the best at BUFF
The Jackass series: BUFF opens with a triple feature of Jackass: The Movie (2002), Jackass Number Two (2006) and Jackass 3D (2010) to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the franchise. Frequent collaborators Jeff Tremaine, Spike Jonze, and Johnny Knoxville cemented their status as gonzo stunt performers and wholly original filmmakers with the release of the first Jackass feature film in 2002. With their next two entries, they became beloved counter-cultural icons, topping stunts performed in the first film and escalating stakes to never-before-seen heights.
Paris is Burning: The landmark documentary released in 1990 provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African American and Latinx Harlem drag-ball scene.
Frankenhooker: A twisted mash-up between John Waters’ Serial Mom and Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, Frank Henenlotter’s Frankenhooker (1990) is a bad taste triumph that revels in sublime camp, gloopy gore, and neon-soaked dreamscapes, plus an iconic performance by Patty Mullen as the eponymous title character.
The Code: Acclaimed and fiercely independent Ukrainian-American writer/director/actor Eugene Kotlyarenko’s latest feature will have its Victorian Premiere at BUFF Closing Night. Starring Peter Vack, Dasha Nekrasova and Ivy Wolk, this high-concept comedy set in the early pandemic joins a paranoid couple trying to revive their deteriorating relationship by embracing surveillance and spying. Using footage from over 70 cameras, memes and TikTok reels, Kotlyarenko presents a voyeuristic exploration of the attention economy and our vapid relationship with technology in a staggering feat of filmmaking.
IKU: Widely celebrated for her genre-bending contributions to queer cinema and media art, Taiwanese-American filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang’s explicit sci-fi IKU (2000) will screen in a special double-feature with the brain-expanding sequel UKI (2023) for the first time ever in Australia.
Continued from above
Hubble, who has worked with SBS and a variety of underground film collectives and festivals in Melbourne and his native Sydney, says he, head of programming Kai Perrignon, and head of operations Rachel Bostock want the Brunswick festival to become a meeting spot for underground filmmakers across Melbourne and Australia “so that we can get together and work out how we’re going to collaborate for the rest of the year”.
The focus on Brunswick also echoes the inner north’s underground film making history, where Melbourne University Film Society students pioneered new filmmaking techniques in Carlton during a decade where no feature films were made in Australia.
BUFF continues the area’s transgressive filmmaking heritage and cements Brunswick’s place in what Hubble says is “another big moment” for underground cinema.
BUFF opens on Friday night at Estonian House with the Jackass triple feature. Tickets for the opening night include a drink on arrival from Brunswick East’s Rocky Ridge Brewing. It gets into full swing on Saturday and Sunday with multiple films on all three screens.
There are full festival and five film passes, while tickets for individual screenings are $8. Tickets and session times can be found at the festival website.
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