Adelaide 2007

"Dry Season - Darrat" Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

Established in 2003 by the South Australian government, the bi-annual Adelaide Film Festival is the youngest and smallest — but no less ambitious — film event among the more established Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane festivals. The carefully curated festival program, with its 150 fiction films, documentaries and shorts, gave the otherwise cinematographically deprived South Australian audience an unique opportunity to discover over eleven days not only a "best of" selection of the major international festivals such as Berlin, Cannes and Toronto, but also nineteen world premieres, among them twelve Australian productions that had been directly supported by the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund. It is worth noting that many of the Australian films playing at the festival had been partly or wholly funded by this Fund, means by the Adelaide Film Festival itself. This establishes an important trend in supporting filmmakers that other film festivals could well encourage and introduce.

The first Adelaide FIPRESCI prize went to Dry Season (Daratt) by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, one of the films of the New Crowned Hope series.

Adelaide Film Festival: February 22 — March 4, 2007, www.adelaidefilmfestival.org

Reports

An Isolated Movie Wonderland. Barbara Lorey portrays the festival which, run by an exclusively female team under its dynamic director Kathrina Sedgwick, "is trying to strategically carve out its own niche in order to boost national and international attention and recognition, to build a reputation overseas and to attract filmmakers", particularly through the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund. "As a matter of fact," writes Barbara Lores, "the AFF is one of the few festivals in the world that directly commissions films."
Humanistic Response to a Fraught Situation. Peter Krausz reviews Mahamat Saleh-Haroun's prize-winning film Dry Season, "a fine example of humanistic filmmaking that provides important messages to the audience, while at the same time reflecting an economical and compelling filmmaking style that resonates in its surface narrative and underlying universal story."  
Towards a Renaissance of the Glorious Seventies. Seeing the Russian and the Australian films at the festival, Kirill Razlogov asks nostalgic: "Where is the great cinema of the 1970s and early 1980s that distinguished both Soviet and Australian film cultures?"

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