When Buck Buckingham’s film The Art of Farewell won Sydney’s Tropfest, he “ran to the stage like Cathy Freeman”. He then had a massive asthma attack – in front of 100,000 people. “Adam Spencer saved my life and dignity by tossing me his ventolin inhaler so I could get a speech out,” he explains.
Buckingham describes the night as one of the best of his life – and invaluable in the development of his career. “I had just been picked up by Fox for a a feature I wrote,” says Buckingham, “I think the win bolstered their faith in me.” The result was two years writing on the Fox lot and one of the most precious resources available to developing filmmakers: solid writing experience.
It’s no wonder that Buckingham describes Tropfest as his “happy place”. The short film festival that was begun by Australian actor-filmmaker John Polson in Darlinghurst’s Tropicana cafe 24 years ago evolved into an annual public event attracting crowds of 100,000 for its finalist screening and awards ceremony.
Tropfest finalists have toured Australia, have been broadcast through deals with SBS2 as well as spawning franchised festivals across the world. Major international stars including Salma Hayek, Samuel L Jackson and Gabriel Byrne have served as judges, and the list of local talent it has promoted into the spotlight have included the likes of Rebel Wilson, Sam Worthington and the Edgerton brothers.
It’s been a gathering place for a community of emerging filmmakers and longtime buffs – and your humble correspondent had the time of her life when her own nutty short film was shown out-of-competition alongside the finalists a few years ago.
Buckingham might not have to worry about packing the ventolin for the foreseeable future – Tropfest’s future looks dicey.
On Wednesday, founder John Polson made the sad announcement that Tropfest 2015 has been cancelled, saying, “It is too early to tell what has actually happened here, although it is hard to avoid concluding there has been a terrible and irresponsible mismanagement of Tropfest funds.”
For finalists – who had been told of their success in advance of the announcement – the news of their missed opportunity is devastating. There were reports on social media on Thursday that a new investor had been found to keep the festival afloat but for the time being, this year’s finalists and younger filmmakers involved in Trop Junior, the festival’s youth competition, wait to hear whether their films will be shown at an outdoor festival. Presto, at least, has offered to stream the shortlisted films.
Certainly, there seems to be confusion as to how such a popular festival could potentially have fallen on its face with so little warning – especially with sponsors as powerful as Qantas, Spotify, Nova radio and Uber, and broadcast partnerships already in place. But those who’ve ever tried to seek refunds on tickets for failed headline music festivals have perhaps a more worldly view of the fragility of cultural event infrastructure when it’s placed in private hands.
Whether Tropfest has deserved its past controversies, this episode is a salient reminder as to why Australian governments have a role in facilitating arts practice and cultural production.
As the Coalition government and their various conservative state counterparts have pursued an agenda to retract greater amounts of support from cultural industries, emerging generations of artists and cultural producers will find their opportunities circumscribed by the commercial instability of enterprises like Tropfest.
This is particularly the case in the beleaguered Australian film industry, currently undergoing a kind of renaissance. It has been nothing short of kneecapped by government interference and mismanagement since the election of the Liberals. One of the forgotten casualties of the great Liberal budget disaster of 2014 was the savage cuts made to film funding authority, Screen Australia. That authority has been forced to consolidate its funding for established projects, leaving only a remnant for the talent development of emerging filmmakers.
On the same night as dark clouds loomed over Tropfest, the NSW-based film development agency, MetroScreen, mourned the end of its existence with a #ValeMetro farewell party and the launch of a final report documenting the parlous state of talent regeneration in the Australian film industry.
The report reveals the effects of cuts of up to 80% of government agency funding available for filmmakers in the career phase between “learning and earning” – with unsurprising equity results. With similar development agencies in Tasmania facing closure and QPix in Queensland already closed by the Newman government, emerging filmmakers rely on only a handful of opportunities to make movies if they aren’t lucky enough to have the personal wealth or privilege to capitalise their projects through private networks.
This is not how you build an industry. The opportunity for Australian film to realise its export potential – like the long-nurtured South Korean film community did – is lost on conservative policymakers. This year, George Brandis took even more funding from Screen Australia, while Turnbull himself, as communications minister, presided over the decision to sell off the television channel that had been available to community broadcasters and was another place for the development of local talent.
There have been calls from Tropfest fans to crowdfund the resurrection of their festival. It’s worth noting that the same call to the same community of film fans was not enough to save MetroScreen.
Liberal rhetoric about crowdfunding and philanthropy is just that; as any arts worker in this country can tell you, encouraging companies to fund the necessary process of development and experimentation required to develop generational talent does not, actually, make such funds magically appear.
The result is a reliance on business that, Tropfest proves, is unstable. The effect is not merely more restricted opportunities for the likes of Buck Buckingham to forge careers in the local industry. Without a regeneration of talent and consistency of investment, there may not remain a local industry to provide careers at all.
