The inaugural Brunswick Underground Film Festival lit up Melbourne’s inner-northern suburb last year with new features and retrospective gems, attracting adventurous cinephiles both local and from further afield. Yet festival director Felix Hubble and his team, including head of programming, Kai Perrignon, had modest ambitions.
‘We were expecting to sell 2000 tickets, best case scenario, and ended up doing 3000,’ says Hubble, a co-founder, alongside Connor Bateman, of film collective Static Vision, as well as a programming consultant with Sydney Film Festival and a former screen programmer at the now shuttered SXSW Sydney.
It seems Melbourne’s appetite for out-there cinema knows no bounds. This year, BUFF’s sophomore outing takes place from 14 to 17 May, overlapping with cinematic showcases including Fantastic Film Festival Australia and Cinema Reborn, but that hasn’t dented the BUFFers’ enthusiasm.
There’s room enough for all in this cinema-hungry city, and Hubble favours a collegiate approach. ‘We’re all independent film festivals. We might as well help each other out.’
With a manifesto encompassing down and dirty films – from ‘no-budget wonders’ and outsiders with ‘righteous pleas for a better world’ through to ‘classics of radical cinema history and even studio movies with the right transgressive energy,’ as Hubble says – BUFF contains multitudes.
Brunswick Underground Film Festival – quick links
Getting ideas across with ‘extremely limited means’
‘We can play The Craft [rumoured to have a $15 million budget] that’s been so important to goth subcultures over time and carries that energy, alongside a $3000, special effects-laden feature from a bunch of uni students in Brisbane that have essentially made their own John Wick with no money,’ Hubble says, pointing to Haruki Ryles’ 100% Pure Rage.
The have-a-go hero Australian contingent also includes north east Victorian director Jack Johnston’s resourceful road movie Everything Grows in Eden, shot on a $9,000 microbudget. ‘I really like looking at the ingenious ways that people are getting their ideas across with extremely limited means,’ Hubble says.
Hubble has lived and breathed cinema from his earliest days, so it’s hardly surprising he’s become champion of the underground cinema that BUFF holds up.
‘My mum told me the first film she took me to see at the cinema was Pocahontas when I was about five years old, and I was as interested in how the sausage was made,’ he says. ‘I was walking around the theatre, checking speakers and behind the curtains.’
Collecting ex-rental videos and on-sold promo CDs at local markets in Sydney’s inner-west as a kid, Hubble went on to work in a variety of film and television gigs, including distribution, marketing, acquisitions, programming and projection.
‘Art is incredibly important to me, and cinema is the most compact way to get across a set of ideas, feelings, emotions, and meaning in the most digestible form possible,’ he says. ‘You get the most bang for your buck, and it’s incredibly accessible.’
But the kind of underground cinema Hubble loves most isn’t always accessible. A prime example is British director Ken Russell’s notorious 1971 cult classic The Devils, which will get a 55th anniversary screening at BUFF’s opening night. ‘There are more documentaries about The Devils than there is the ability to watch The Devils,’ Hubble says.
Bringing underground cinema into the light
Starring Vanessa Redgrave as a horny nun obsessed with Oliver Reed’s politically compromised priest in 17th century France, The Devils is a sexually-charged spectacular that sparked a censorious sensation and features astonishing production design from queer filmmaking hero Derek Jarman at the start of his career.
Screening The Devils at Balam Balam Place, a community meeting space, rather than a traditional cinema like partner venue Brunswick Picture House, allows BUFF to pass the needle through the ban on theatrical.
‘Any opportunity I get to screen The Devils, I’ll take it,’ Hubble says. ‘It was mangled by the studio, released, withdrawn and sat in exhibition rights hell, with [UK film critic] Mark Kermode doing a lot of great work on getting it out there.
‘It really deserves a beautiful new 4K restoration with all the trimmings. That does not exist, but we will be screening the most complete version in the highest quality we can.’
Upskilling the next generation
This year’s BUFF also includes a free industry symposium aimed at upskilling emerging filmmakers, critics, programmers and screening groups.
‘BUFF’s in the same universe of what we’ve been trying to do with Static Vision and with Jordan Bastion at SXSW Sydney, which is to highlight voices from around the globe, creating a spot for people to come and engage with them in a way that might inspire their own ideas,’ Hubble says.
‘One of the most heartening things that’s happened in the past couple of years is I’ve started getting emails from younger filmmakers who might have been in the SXSW screen program or encountered me talk about these ideas elsewhere, and they’re like, “I’ve made this thing” and seeing that blossom out.’
With affordable or free ticketing, BUFF is all about uplifting with minimal hurdles. ‘By the nature of how film festivals work, it’s quite tricky for filmmakers to break into the institutional players,’ Hubble says. ‘I’m always thinking about the next generation. I want to see their films – and I want people to be doing events in 20 years that I want to go to.’
Underground cinema is a petri dish of talent. ‘Particularly within queer communities at the moment, especially the younger crew making really interesting stuff on tiny budgets that’s super scrappy,’ Hubble says. ‘Those are the films currently moving the cinematic language forward.’
Every generation has an underground cinematic movement that winds up shifting the mainstream dial, ‘like mumblecore films in the early noughties,’ Hubble suggests. ‘They really laid the groundwork for what became prestige TV.’
‘And now, the queer underground filmmaking community, with no institutional support, is developing new visuals and language that will become the lexicon in 10 years. People like prolific Australian filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay, Canadian Louise Weard [Castration Movie Chapter III is playing at BUFF], and The People’s Joker creator Vera Drew in the US, whose work has really fucking uplifted a bunch of 20-year-olds, telling them, “Hey, you can do this”.’
If Hubble can, you can, he insists. ‘Felix is shambolic. He is unkempt. But if he can pull it together, maybe you can too?’
