JACK SARGEANT

All Revved Up

The Revelation Perth International Film Festival hits the Astor Theatre from Thursday, July 14, ’til Sunday, July 24. More info can be found at revelationfilmfest.org.

Appropriately enough, Jack Sargeant had himself a bit of a revelation recently.

“I realised that the theme this year is outsiders,” he says thoughtfully. “In that every single film has a main character who is an outsider, in term of both narrative features and the feature length documentaries.”

He’s speaking, of course, about the line-up at this year’s Revelation Perth International Film Festival, Perth’s celebration of the arch, the extreme, and the avant-garde in cinema, of which Sargeant is the curator. Over the past year he has slaved tirelessly in the celluloid mines in order to bring to us a diverse and fascinating program of treats for the discerning cineaste.

Of course, any such thematic throughline can only be applied in retrospect, and the sheer scale of the curator’s task makes any kind of planned attack impossible. “Any theme in the festival comes up afterwards when I have to answer questions,” he says. “I was just thinking on the plane over that all the films are about outsiders. Ultimately I think all cinema is about someone who is a bit different.”

Whittling down the vast number of possible films into a workable shortlist is an arduous job, to say the least. “I wrote to 400 different filmmakers this year, to get films I was interested in,” Sargeant explains. “And then we get another 500 films submitted, including shorts. In terms of the features and stuff that I chased, out of that 300 I select the ones that I like. And out of the submitted films, I watch all the features and then Richard watches the shorts. It goes on all year. There’s already ideas for next year.”

When pressed for details on the highlights of this year’s films, Sargeant grows animated. “We’ve got Heaven And Earth And Joe Davis,” he tells us. “Who is a scientist who is also an artist. He makes really wry social commentary using science, and it’s a really amazing film. He’s actually coming over as a guest. But he’s an outsider, in that he’s an artist and a scientist, but more than that. You have to watch the film. He made a vibrator, like a dildo with a sensor in it, to sense vaginal contractions and then broadcast them out into space as a commentary on the exclusion of women in the space program.

“And then we’ve got the Genesis P-Orridge documentary, The Ballad Of Genesis And Lady Jaye,” he continues, not breaking stride. “And in terms of features we’ve got Mars, which is about three slackers going to Mars. It’s also got Kinky Friedman in it, he’s the president of America in it, so that’s great. What else have we got? Troll Hunter, about these students who are following a guy who hunts bears, and it turns out they’re not hunting bears at all, they’re hunting trolls. He’s a kind of mad outsider who races around Norway in his camper van. Hobo With A Shotgun, which is so much fun, that film. And Kill List, which is the nastiest horror film you’re ever gonna see, I reckon. It freaks people out. It’s a really good horror film.

“Submarine is a really interesting one, because we’ve actually got the Australian premiere of that. It’s such a great film. Most coming of age films are really banal, but this is really fun, because the guy in it fancies himself as an intellectual, so there’s this mad narration all the way through it. And it’s good to see a coming of age film that isn’t obvious, that does things differently.”Submarine is also the feature directorial debut of cult comedian Richard Ayoade, probably best known for his work in The I.T. Crowd and The Mighty Boosh.

It’s a high-profile line-up, with numerous films, including Hobo and Troll Hunter, having garnered rave reviews and internet buzz on the European and North American festival circuits. “They weren’t high profile when I started chasing them a year ago,” says Sargeant. “Of all these films, the highest profile right now is probably Tyrannosaur. And Meek’s Cutoff. But a lot of this stuff, I think maybe 75 per cent of them are Australian premieres. There’s a couple of crossover films, like the cricket one, Fire in Babylon, but even then it’s a cricket film that only people like us could screen. It’s not like watching the ABC. It’s a very odd cricket film. If you like reggae and West Indian cricketers fast bowling at English racists, you’ll get something out of this.”
There’s no doubt that this year boasts an impressive and eclectic selection, but one still has to wonder if there’s still a viable cultural space for films of this nature? This is the age of the flatscreen and the digital download, after all.

“I can’t say how popular we’ll be. Last year we had a good year, and I hope this year will be good,” he says. “I think the more that people are encouraged to see films in multiplexes and watch them on widescreen TVs, the less space there is for this kind of film. Festivals like Rev exist to give these films space. And the irony is that because there’s so little space for these films, people do come who want to see them. In the end what matters is that audiences get what you’re doing.”