What’s the future of the Australian film industry?

The script for The Long Passeggiata, inspired by the true history of the thousands of Italian women who travelled to Australia to meet their husbands, men they had “married by proxy” in their home village, emanated from a single image.  

“One image that’s always excited me is all these brides ascending the Australian landscape, into this wasteland of mystery,” director Julian Curtis told Crikey.

The thing that kept co-authors Curtis and Josie Montano going was this image.

“That’s what’s kept the project alive over a few years of… look, it’s hard to get the budget to make a period piece,” he said. “The visuals have kept that enthusiasm alive.”

Montano said the film covered an important part of Australian history that hadn’t previously been explored in fiction. 

“When Julian brought this idea to me, it just kind of matched in because I grew up with a lot of these women in country Victoria,” she said. “My parents knew a lot of these ladies who had come out. Some of the marriages made it and some of them didn’t.”

The Long Passeggiata is one of four unproduced scripts selected by the Campari “Posters to Production” initiative — the company has designed posters for each, which are displayed at the Campari cinema lounge at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) this year. Each carries a QR code which leads to a GoFundMe page to help the film raise production funds.

What does such an initiative say about the health of Australian cinema?

Of the nearly $1 billion taken in by all films at the Australian box office in 2022, $48.6 million was claimed by Australian films, and of that, $33 million was for Baz Luhrmann’s love letter to Americana, Elvis.

“It’s tricky in Australia — it’s a big conversation to have but funding in Australia tends to be for small things or the big companies, there doesn’t seem to be a time in an Australian production house’s life when they say ‘OK, no more funding for us, we’re going to survive solely on the box office’,” Curtis said. “They always tend to go back. So middle-career artists are, I think, falling by the wayside because of the structure.”

Natalie James, director of Relic — one of the steady stream of horror releases in the past decade that may well represent Australian cinema’s biggest recent success — told Crikey short films were crucial for developing artists.

“As a director, no-one is going to just give you a job, it’s really portfolio based,” she said. “It’s not just having this calling card, but also taking a film on the festival circuit is so important for networking.”

Film critic Travis Johnson told Crikey it’s a common difficulty for emerging filmmakers.

“It’s harder and harder to get funding for a film if you’re not already established with a few funded projects under your belt. How do you do that? By getting funding. How do you get funding? By having a solid track record,” he told Crikey. “So it contributes to a sense, whether or not it’s true, of gate-keeping at funding bodies.”

“It’s a perception that is tacitly acknowledged by everyone, and openly spoken about by no-one. And it’s certainly true that you often see the same people and the same production houses — who are often doing good work — getting funding time after time.” 

Montano said screen funding bodies, both nationally and in her home state of Queensland, seemed less and less inclined to support short films. Curtis agreed.

“When I first started out, there was a number of initiatives for short films, and I was lucky enough to go through a number of them,” he said. “They seem to have dried up, especially for middle-career artists.”

Both Curtis and Montano were quick to emphasise they like the freedom of raising funds privately, rather than relying on the government to determine what they can and can’t make. But it’s not as if the government doesn’t spend money on films made in Australia — it’s just that most of those films aren’t made by Australians, much less telling Australian stories.

Nearly $4 billion has flowed into international productions via tax rebates and cash subsidies over the past 15 years as successive federal governments attempted to hook big-budget movie productions.

Since 2019 alone, the location incentive scheme has nearly exhausted its $540 million budget. Of the 36 film and TV productions financed through the scheme, only one film is classified as Australian, while tens of millions of dollars went to Marvel films and Disney franchises.

Over the same four-year period, the former federal government gave $400 million to the local screen industry funding body, Screen Australia. It was during this same period that creatives were famously left short-changed by JobKeeper. Australia’s entire cultural industry will receive $300 million in federal funding over the next four years. Everyone Crikey spoke to talked of dwindling money for short films, as funding bodies move towards television and episodic online content in the streaming era.

Travis Johnson has a suggestion:

“We need to bring back the 10BA tax concessions of the Ozploitation era,” he said. “Make investing in films in Australia a more attractive tax write-off than investing in real estate. We’d kill two birds with one stone.”

Should the government be doing more to support the local film industry? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.