SCIFI FILM FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES 2018 OFFICIAL COMPETITION JURY

Ozploitation legend Brian Trenchard-Smith, Australian Director’s Guild honoree Julietta Boscolo and AWGIE Award winner Jonathan Ogilvie will judge the 9 features and 16 short films in Official Competition at the 2018 SciFi Film Festival.

“I approached Brian, Julietta and Jonathan because they are three of the most distinctive, ambitious and assured cinematic storytellers our industry sector has produced,” said SciFi Film Festival Program Director and Screen-Space Managng Editor Simon Foster. “They represent the kind of instinctive visionaries that the SciFi Film Festival celebrates in its programming. We wanted to celebrate it in choosing our judges as well.”

Brian Trenchard-Smith needs no introduction to genre fans, whose filmography is revered by audiences both locally and around the world. The director of sci-fi cult classics Turkey Shoot (1982), Frog Dreaming (1986) and Dead End Drive-In (1986), Trenchard-Smith has recently been honoured with retrospectives of his work at Karlovy Vary, Melbourne, Brisbane and Toronto film festivals; in 2016, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Fantaspoa International Fantastic Film Festival. His first novel, the science-fiction/fantasy epic Alice Through the Multiverse, was recently published on Amazon and Kindle.

Upon graduating with a Masters in Directing from Victorian College of The Arts, Julietta Boscolo was chosen as one of only 35 filmmakers globally to attend the Edinburgh International Film Festival’s Talent Lab. Her 2012 film Sam’s Gold earned her the Australian Director’s Guild Best Director (Short) Award; in 2017, she won the Melbourne International Film Festival’s 2017 Emerging Filmmaker Award for her short film Let’s See How Fast This Baby Will Go, a film that was pre-selected to screen at the Cannes Critics Week. Julietta is currently developing the sci-fi-themed web-series Sunshine, for which she received funding via Screen Australia’s Gender Matters Brilliant Stories initiative.

Having taken out top honours at Tropfest 1996 and secured a Palme d’Or nomination for his short This Film is a Dog, Jonathan Ogilvie has forged a career highlighted by the critically acclaimed features Emulsion (2006) and The Tender Hook (2008). Starring Hugo Weaving and Rose Byrne, The Tender Hook earned five AFI Award nominations and won Ogilvie the Writer’s Guild AWGIE Award for Best Feature Film Screenplay. For his next project, Ogilvie will adapt Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent into a feature called Lone Wolf, reteaming him with star Hugo Weaving and directing one of the world’s first feature-length films employing virtual reality technology.   

All feature films in Official Competition for the SciFi Film Festival’s top honours will vie for Film, Actor, Actress, Music/Sound and Effects categories. Short films will compete for Best Australian and Best International honours.

Winners will be announced in an informal ceremony on the Closing Night of the festival, Sunday October 21, followed by the Australian Premiere of director Johan Earl’s short SHIFT and a retrospective screening of Steve De Jarnatt’s 1988 cult classic MIRACLE MILE.

The 2018 SciFi Film Festival will run October 18-21 at Event Cinemas George St Sydney. Session details and tickets available here.

(Content is republished from a press release written for the SciFi Film Festival by Simon Foster)