AN Aboriginal boy's life experience, female friendship, the pitfalls of crowd-funding, the execution of the Bali Nine drug-traffickers and Newcastle's infamous Star Hotel Riot are just some of the stories that will be told when the Real Film Festival returns in two weeks.
Since 2012 the festival has given Hunter film-lovers an opportunity to explore a diverse range of issues through short and feature-length documentaries.
After beginning in Newcastle, the festival has since expanded to Lake Macquarie, Port Stephens and Maitland.
"The idea is to continue to grow the festival so it becomes a Hunter festival," festival director Annette Hubber says. "That's ultimately our goal, to end up in all of the Hunter council areas.
"I wanted to grow it gradually so we could work out all the problems before we set out and grew too big too quickly.
"Now what we're doing is, we've changed the model a bit where we run two workshops, a short film and a feature film in each local government area and at least one of those films has an important issue to that area they're running in or they're made by a local film-maker that lives in that area."
However, this eighth edition of the festival has been problematic for Hubber.
Last December Newcastle's Tower Cinemas closed after 42 years of operation, leaving the festival without a headquarters.
As an alternative, the Newcastle component of the festival will be screened between Customs House, the Newcastle Museum and the Newcastle Conservatorium of Music.
"Our lack of independent cinemas is a huge problem that we're really struggling with this year, hence we're building screens in the venues we're going into," Hubber says.
"It was probably one of the greatest challenges. Hopefully the Victoria Theatre will come on line soon and we'll be able to screen there or the Tower Cinemas will re-open, so we'll have a cinema environment to screen them."
Hubber recommends the feature film In My Blood It Runs about a 10-year-old Aboriginal boy, Dujuan, living in Alice Springs and Execution Island, about the deaths of Australian drug-traffickers, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, as being among the festival highlights.
"We actually shot the final scene at Maitland Gaol so we're going back to screen the film [Execution Island] at Maitland Gaol," she says. "I think maybe that'll be quite confronting or hard-hitting for a lot of people."
Besides the films, there will also be a series of workshops held throughout with film-makers, visual effect experts, line producers and screen writers.
The Real Film Festival opens at 6pm on Friday, November 15, with a screening of the documentary Star Hotel Riot, by Newcastle film-makers Tony Whittaker and Glenn Dormand, best known as Chit Chat Von Loopin Stab from Machine Gun Fellatio and Foxtel's Music Max.
Following the screening, Whittaker and Dormand will also conduct a Q&A about the documentary.
Since being released six weeks ago, Star Hotel Riot has already attracted 11,000 views on YouTube.
The 1979 riot - besides the 1989 earthquake - is arguably the most famous news event in Newcastle history. However, the documentary has shed new light on the night 4000 people fought with police at the closure of the popular pub, using a host of unreleased footage filmed by NBN.
It includes remarkable scenes where a policeman is clocked in the head with a rock and footage of police using fire hoses to disperse the crowd.
"NBN had lost the rest of the footage," Dormand says inside the far more refined modern Star Hotel.
"They'd made the six minutes out of the 22 minutes that existed and the rest went to the cutting room floor. The cops had taken all the footage and they arrested people based on what was found in the footage. It had been floating around the cops.
"This cop gave me a copy and one of his kids back in the day had taped Footrot Flats over it and we're going, 'Holy f--k, where's the footage?'. It became a unicorn."
READ MORE:Newcastle remembers how the Star Hotel's last night turned into mayhem amid the music and booze
Star Hotel Riot will also be screened at Wollongong and Perth film festivals.
"It's wonderful with it being at Newcastle's festival as these guys specialise in promoting Newcastle stories and our website is Stories Of Our Town, so it's great to be incorporated in it," Dormand says.
"When you start getting people outside town interested, you know you're onto something."
Visit realfilmfestival.com.au for a full list of films and screening times.
