The Sydney Film Festival is 70 years old this year. Programmer Jenny Neighbour has been there for almost half that number. SFF 2023 will be her 34th festival. She has seen many changes in film and festival culture in her time, she tells Limelight.
“When I started here, films arrived in huge metal canisters from all over the world. We had teams of people driving them from the airport and between cinemas. It was a nightmare!”
A still from Chevalier
It’s easy to feel nostalgic for the physical medium of film in the digital age, but Neighbour says the convenience of digital formats and delivery outweigh it. “It used to be so hard to get subtitled prints of non-English language films, because there were very few in circulation. And being in Australia, we were somehow always last in line. Now we can get a film from a distributor to a screen in just a couple of hours.”
The Sydney Film Festival itself has undergone many other transformations since it flickered into life at Sydney University in the mid-1950s as a four-day event capped at 1,200 attendees. Now it is one of the...
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