Looking Back On 65 Years Of The Sydney Film Festival

David Donaldson, the inaugural director of the Sydney Film Festival

In 1954, not quite a decade after the end of WWII, the world began to open up again, tentatively feeling its way through our cinema screens.

Springing out of the 900-strong Sydney University film society, a 23-year-old Donaldson found himself thrust into the limelight as the director of the inaugural Sydney Film Festival (SFF), though he's very keen to stress it was a group effort. "I had a research job at the University of NSW at the time, which meant other people thought I had nothing to do," he laughs.

The initial program was drawn from the wide array of interests of his film society allies, from scientific documentaries, to amateur movies, to retrospective screenings. In a sign of the post-war bridges being built, the festival also formed a strong relationship with Japan during those initial years.

"They became quite accommodating at sending their excellent films to the festival," Donaldson recalls. "The film industry at the time was completely controlled by the Americans, with the British hanging on their coat tails. We felt we had to strike out on our own to get access to the films you could read about that no one was showing in Australia."

He's very glad to see the festival is in rude health 65 years later, representing a cavalcade of nationalities. "I get a kick out of the growth of international cinema and the hundreds of unusual films that arrive in this country every year now."

Valerie Levy, Paddington

Hailing from New York City, Levy moved to town 45 years ago to teach communications at the University of Technology Sydney. "Going to the festival was my retirement gift to myself," she says. "I love the State Theatre, there's something about that beautiful venue and I love having my reserved seat there so I can get up after a film, go out and come back to the same seat. It's very luxurious."

A subscriber who particularly loves drama, Levy relishes the surprises thrown up over her two decades of attendance. "I'm a film buff who goes for the weirdo films that nobody would see," she chuckles.

She has loved exploring the cinema of Scandinavian countries at SFF, as well as that from the fraught theatre of the Middle East. "Iranian films are often fabulous," she says. "I'm Jewish, but I am not pro-Israel, so I'm very much a supporter of Palestinian film, and often Israeli films are very good too."

While the SFF subscriber ticket allows her to see four movies each day, Levy says two is usually enough. "I'm too old to see that many without falling asleep, which would be annoying. It's guesswork as to what I won't mind missing."

Jenny Templin, Cronulla

A photographer who has snapped the Dalai Lama on several occasions, Templin can't exactly pin the year she first came to the festival, but it was over 20 years ago when she lived in the Inner West. These days she trains in from Cronulla. "It's quite a slog, but it's worth it," she says.

When a friend first suggested they share a subscriber ticket between them, Templin couldn't imagine taking in more than one movie a day, but as it happens that friend dropped out and she ended up going to them all. "I immediately fell in love and look forward to going every year, apart from last year, because I was away in Tibet."

The films that have left the biggest mark on Templin during that time have been the documentary The Cove, about the slaughter of dolphins in Japan, and the powerful hybrid docu-drama The Act Of Killing, re-enacting mass executions of accused Communists in Indonesia, casting several of the perpetrators.

"I love being immersed in other people's realities," she says. "I find that it's like an altered reality when I walk out, at the end of each day, and find myself in the middle of the city. Like this is now my film and I'm going to watch what happens."

Michele Asprey, CBD

Attending for almost 30 years, Asprey's first exposure to SFF came when she quit as a full-time lawyer to pursue a consultancy business and found she had a bit of spare time. She was so enamoured by a retrospective strand on British noir that she ended up studying for a PhD on the subject.

"That introduced me to films I was vaguely aware of but hadn't looked at in any great detail, so you could say the festival changed my life," she reveals. "Interestingly enough, the British equivalent of noir don't usually have a femme fatale, they are more about homme fatales."

Focusing her PhD on Basil Dearden's 1961 film Victim, starring Dirk Bogarde and Sylvia Syms, it was the first English language movie to feature the word "homosexual". Asprey says she has been a keen follower of queer cinema at SFF, noting that the 65th program has a strong lesbian contingent.

"Cinema is a very large part of my life and every year I rule two weeks out of the diary and just go night and day. Then as some of the films roll out over the coming year, people will say, 'Do you wanna go to...' and I'll say, 'Seen it.'"