St.George OpenAir is celebrating its twentieth anniversary with the usual line-up of recently released films and local premieres.
This season 38 films will screen, 10 of them repeated, with 13 premieres and previews.
According to the event's managing director, Rob Bryant, the most popular titles have been Looking for Grace on opening night, plus Carol, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Spectre, and the Coens' Hail, Caesar!, which is screening twice towards the end of the program.
Bryant spends half the year in North America, where he scouts festivals such as Toronto and New York for suitable product.
Along with the films, the core of the event is the towering screen – and the view beyond it.
"It's the same screen we've been using for twenty years", Bryant said.
"350 square metres, which makes it three storeys high. It's used in Lake Zurich during their summer and then it comes down to Sydney".
The founder and chairman of the Cinerent OpenAir company, Peter Hürlimann, built four such screens decades ago, all of which were used in European markets.
In a bid to find a home in the off-season, Hürlimann visited South Africa and Australia, where the first season took place at Darling Harbour's Chinese Gardens after the founder's bid to erect a cinema at the foot of the Botanic Gardens was knocked back.
"It's not easy putting the screen in the harbour", Bryant said. "You need to fulfill all sorts of engineering requirements. It can be quite windy and it's a huge screen, so you've got to have some counterforce for that."
Eventually the then director of the Sydney Festival, Leo Schofield, came to the rescue, and for its first five years OpenAir was an umbrella event of the Sydney Festival.
It's been selling out ever since. Capacity has expanded from 1400 to 2050, and this year the screen has moved forty metres to the north.
This Saturday will see a reduced-price screening of Eddie the Eagle – the first anywhere after the film's Sundance bow – in celebration of the event's twentieth anniversary.
Starring Tarin Egerton (Kingsman: The Secret Service) and Hugh Jackman, Eddie the Eagle is the story of Michael Edwards, who gained global infamy in 1988 when he defied critics, authorities, the odds and gravity to become the first British athlete to compete in the 70 metre and 90m ski jumps at the Winter Olympics.