With a growing reputation as Australia’s most relevant independent screen event, the Revelation Perth International Film Festival is proud to announce a host of outstanding writers, directors, producers, acquisitions and distribution people, plus various ‘movers and shakers’ from the film industry. Known for its highly accessible environment, Revelation’s guests are frequently to be found at the Astor and are more than happy to talk film.
Revelation Program Director Jack Sargeant said "The guests at Rev this year are once again drawn from across the industry, from programmer Bryan Wendorf of the Chicago Underground Film Festival to French documentarian Angelique Bosio, from experimental filmmakers such as Soda Jerk and Tony Lawrence to Australia's much loved critics David and Margaret. We have director John Alan Simon running a workshop on adapting novels for film, we have Stefan Popescu and Katherine Berger showing people how to make a feature film for less than $10K. Joe Davis, the subject of one of this year's docos, is going to be in town too. Then of course there's the live music events – on opening night we have a band comprising of members of Bridezilla and Decoder Ring and then there's the live soundtrack to the movie Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. And director, author and star of our closing night feature – LBF – will all be in town too. As ever, the Astor bar will be a home from home for the guests, the industry, our audiences and Rev crew, and – like previous years – we'll all be there talking about movies and film culture, and of course everybody will be inspired and enthused.”
The Revelation Perth International Film Festival runs 14-24 July at the Astor Theatre, Perth WA.
Revelation is proudly supported by the Australian and West Australian Governments through ScreenWest, Eventscorp and Screen Australia.
See following for a full list of the guests for Revelation 2011.
REV GUESTS 2011
Katherine Berger has produced three feature films, Rosebery 7470, Nude Study and Zombie Massacre III. Katherine also makes short experimental film works, is one of the founders / directors of the Sydney Underground Film Festival and produces the XFilm television series for community television.
Cry Bloxsome is a writer of novels in an audio-visual age. Seeing the error of his ways, he now lives in anti-literary seclusion in a surf town in Queensland, where a small college pays him to teach young Swiss ladies English. His first novel is titled Living Between Fucks and has recently been adapted by Writer/Director Alex Munt into the pop-art film LBF.
Angélique Bosio is a French film director and producer born in 1978. She began her career working in sales for the company Mondofilms and later moved into production. In 2002 she began working on Llik your Idols (2007), a documentary about the Cinema of Transgression and New-York’s New Wave of the eighties. The Advocate For Fagdom is her latest feature documentary. Angelique is currently working on a documentary about fashion and lingerie designer Fifi Chachnil. She lives in Paris.
Dirk de Bruyn has made numerous experimental, documentary and animation films and new media interactive works over the last 35 years and continues to maintain a no-budget, independent, self-funded focus for much of this work. His multi-screen performance work has recently featured in venues and festivals in Melbourne, Brisbane, Tokyo, Wellington, Auckland, London, Paonia (Colorado USA) and The Hague and Utrecht in Netherlands. He has written on and curated various programs of film and video art internationally. In the early 90s de Bruyn taught animation at Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada. He is currently teaching animation and digital culture at Deakin University in Victoria.
For more than 30 years, Joe Davis, a research affiliate in the Department of Biology at MIT has created art both physical and conceptual using diverse scientific practice and limitless imagination. He has constructed sculptural installation works, imagined an artificial Aurora, put a map of the Milky Way into the ear of a transgenic mouse, devised means of listening to living microscopic cells and transformed vaginal contractions into radio signals and beamed them into outer space, amongst other things. This work provokes thought regarding existence, our genetic and atomic fabric, possibly revealing truths mere artists or mere scientists might not be able to reach without the interdisciplinary approach employed by Davis. As an educator Davis has worked in the MIT graduate architecture program (Master of Science in Visual Studies) and in undergraduate painting and mixed media at the Rhode Island School of Design. His own work has been exhibited in the United States, Canada and at Ars Electronica in Austria.
Brent Green is a self-taught animated filmmaker and artist who lives and works in a barn in the rural United States. His films and artwork have been shown at the Sundance Film Festival (2006-9), MoMA, the Getty Center, Warhol Museum, the Walker Arts Center, the Kitchen, Hammer Museum, EMPAC, the Rotterdam International Film Festival and tons of other museums and festivals around the world. Green’s artwork is represented by the Andrew Edlin Gallery, NYC.
Drew Henkels is a day-dreamer and late-sleeper with a (mostly) healthy obsession with the supernatural. His band Drew & the Medicinal Pen provides a soundtrack to the dust-bunny world of his dream logs, films, and photographs.
Donna K. makes a lot of stuff like art and cookies. She’s made animations for the fiction journal Electric Literature, for Drew & the Medicinal Pen and for her own musical efforts. After working on Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, she can also add acting (she played Mary Wood in the film), hammering and writing to her list of current accomplishments. Her collage works were recently featured in Gestalten Press’ new book Cutting Edges:Contemporary Collage.
Richard Kuipers is a film critic for the international trade paper Variety and a feature film curator and historian for the National Film and Sound Archive website australianscrenonline: http://aso.gov.au/ . He has been festival advisor/curator for the Goethe Institute’s Festival of German Films since 2005. He produced the national television programme The Movie Show on SBS TV between 1992 and 2000 and has produced and directed documentaries including Stone Forever (1999), a look at one of Australia’s most famous cult films. Specialising in weird cinema, Richard curated the Future Shocks sidebar at the 1999 and the Immortal Seduction: The Vampire Movie retrospective for the 2010 Sydney Film Festival.
Tony Lawrence’s work in experimental film focuses almost entirely on 8mm and 16mm found film, winning awards at The Sydney Underground Film Festival and screening at REV in 2009. For the past 5 years Tony has also produced and presented the short film show Sydney Shorts for Community TV.
Leon Marvell is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media in the School of Communication & Creative Arts at Deakin University. His film and media art works have been exhibited in Australia and internationally for the past 25 years. He is a writer and reviewer for several national and international media arts journals, with a particular interest in new media art forms. He is also a contributor to scholarly journals concerned with the fantastic in the arts. Of the genres associated with the fantastic, he has a particular interest in SF and the increasing convergence of everyday life with the globalized technological imaginary.
Mike McGinley‘s name was alternately spelled correctly then misspelled in Brent Green’s film Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, in which he played the leading character, Leonard Wood. As a musician, McGinley leads the Chicago cabaret band The Bitter Tears and tours and records with Califone.
Writer and director of Charlie Casanova Terry McMahon has been awarded the RKO Pictures Hartley-Merrill International Screenwriting Prize in Cannes and Los Angeles, the Tiernan McBride Screenwriting Award, and selected for the Tribeca Film Festival All Access Program. Commissioned to write the screenplays Soul Cages for Daryl Hannah, Swordland and Cancer Cowboy for Paddy Breathnach, Savage for Valerie Red Horse, Slice for Richie Smith, Fear for Robert Pejo, and, co-written with Mark O’Rowe, Sisk for Brian O’Malley, along with the original spec screenplays, Simple Simon, The Dancehall Bitch, Oliver Twisted, and The War Room. Central roles as an actor include, alongside David Carradine, Dangerous Curves, Don Wilson in Moving Target, Jonathan Pryce and Paul Bettany in The Suicide Club and most recently played the pederast in Paul Fraser’s My Brothers. First Class Honors Masters Degree in Screenwriting from IADT, guest lecturer on Acting and Writing at DIT and IADT, The John Huston Film School, and Trinity College, Dublin.
Alex Munt has a background in design. He is and independent filmmaker and screen media academic in the Department of Media, Music, Communication & Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. Alex has credits in short film, feature film, film titles and music video. He writes regularly on topics including microbudget cinema, digital filmmaking, screenwriting, music video, fashion & design media. Alex’s debut feature LBF which he wrote, directed and produced was selected to world premiere at South By Southwest (SXSW) film festival in 2011.
In LBF, Gracie Otto plays the role of Goodchild’s ex-girlfriend ‘The Dead Girl’. Otto made a striking double debut as the female lead in Three Blind Mice (2008) which screened at London (Winner International Critics Best Film), Toronto, SXSW, Dublin, Thessaloniki (Winner Best Screenplay), Sydney (Highly Commended) and Melbourne Film Festivals. With a strong cinematic heritage, and following in the footsteps of father Barry and sister Miranda, Gracie Otto combines screen acting and filmmaking. For LBF she doubled as the ‘2nd Unit’ Director for the Paris scenes.
Margaret Pomeranz gained an Arts degree in German and Psychology from Macquarie University. She was a stringer for the Bulletin and for ABC Rural Radio. She met and married filmmaker Hans Pomeranz and became involved with and enthusiastic about the 1970s 'new wave' of Australian film. She attended the Playwright's Studio at NIDA and wrote for television, radio and film. She produced and wrote a number of programs for SBS before establishing The Movie Show with David Stratton in 1986. During that time Margaret was Executive Producer with SBS for such programs as Front Up, Subsonics, the AFI Awards and the If Awards. She has served as a member of the Advertising Standards Board, is a past President of the Film Critics Circle of Australia, and is a past President, currently vice-President of Watch on Censorship. She is also a member of the inaugural board of the Australian Writers' Foundation.
Stefan Popescu is a director, writer, artist and university lecturer. Making films for over 10 years, he has completed 2 features (seen at numerous internationals festivals), with two more soon to be released. Popescu is also one of the founders/directors of the Sydney Underground Film Festival.
Tim Rutili is a musician, filmmaker and visual artist. He is founder and principal songwriter of bands Califone and Red Red Meat. Also a member of Ugly Casanova and Boxhead Ensemble, Rutili has contributed to albums by Modest Mouse, Sage Francis and many others. Together with Glen Sherman he founded Better Angel Films, which produced his feature directorial debut All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, premiering at Sundance 2010. The film is also the companion piece to Califone’s ninth album of the same name. The album was released in October 2009 (Dead Oceans/Secretly Canadian). He has composed music for television, documentary and feature films, as well as directed short films and music videos. His film Three Legged Animals was screened at the Getty Museum as part of Distributed Memory: Projected Images and Live Music. Rutili and Califone recently created the soundtrack for The Calling, a PBS series exploring faith and religion.
John Alan Simon adapted and directed Philip K Dick's Radio Free Albemuth. His experience in cinema stretches from developing and producing Roger Donaldson's The Getaway, through to producing and moderating the BAFTA/LA's annual seminar for the American Film Market. He has adapted Dick's novel Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said and the film is currently in pre-production. As president and choef executive of Discovery Productions he is currently working on Jim Thompson's cult hardboiled novel Pop.1280. He will be discussing adapting novels into scripts at Rev.
In their videos, installations and performance lectures Soda_Jerk work with audiovisual samples to revise and interrogate historical events and cultural trajectories. Within their work sampling becomes a means of synthesising recorded space-times to create alternate historical realities, producing a form of radical historiography that merges research, documentary and speculative fiction. Working together since 2002, Soda_Jerk are a collaboration between sisters Dan and Dominique Angeloro. They are currently based in Berlin.
David Stratton is a former Director of the Sydney Film Festival, former film critic for the international film industry magazine Variety, and is currently film critic for The Australian. A recipient of the Australian Film Institute’s Raymond Longford Award, David has also served as a former President of the International Critics Jury for the Cannes and Venice Film Festivals, authored two books, and is currently lecturing in Film History as part of the Continuing Education Program at the University of Sydney.
John Michael Swartz plays the cello and composes experimental computer music. His work covers a lot of ground: from chance, improvisation, and Fluxus-style happenings, to generative algorithmic structures, granular synthesis, and other mathy things. These are in turn informed by his interests in various philosophical topics, such as language, ethics, and metaphysics. Swartz was part of Guy Maddin’s orchestra for Brand Upon the Brain. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Bryan Wendorf, is the Co-Founder, Artistic Director and Programmer of the Chicago Underground Film Festival (http://www.cuff.org), now in its 18th year. He has written about film, music, comics and popular culture for a variety of publications including New City, Indiewire, It’s Only A Movie! and Wormwood Chronicles. He lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.