Author Jake Wilson

Aspiring filmmakers in Australia and elsewhere stand to learn a lot from John Cumming’s The Films of John Hughes, not least about how to deal with funding bodies. An innovator in documentary and adjoining field...

It’s December 2014, and I’m researching a book on the 1976 bushranger film Mad Dog Morgan – one of the best Australian films of the 1970s, a far-out antipodean Western directed by the much underrated pop surrea...

When I think of John Flaus, my mind goes back to an evening ten or 15 years ago, when Fitzroy’s Erwin Rado Theatre hosted a rare revival of Salt of the Earth – an independent, communist-backed drama about a str...

I met Albie Thoms only once, in 2009, when the Australian Centre for the Moving Image revived his 1969 feature Marinetti – an avant-garde extravaganza described in Thoms’ 1978 essay collection Polemics For a Ne...

The time is 1980; the place, a crucial node on the grid of inner Melbourne, where Swanston Street, running north to south, crosses Flinders Street, running east to west. Four corners, four landmarks. Southwest...

Another Opening, Another Show In Joe Dante’s satirical Small Soldiers (1998), a range of high-tech action figures is marketed under the slogan “Everything Else Is Just a Toy.” Perhaps this year’s Melbourne I...

This essay originally appeared on the website of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and was written to accompany the retrospective “Grain Of The Voice: 50 Years Of Sound and Image” which I curated. ...

Once, and appropriately, Melbourne based filmmaker Leo Berkeley went under the moniker of “last of the independents”. Having shaped a decades-long body of work on the fringes of the industry, he talks at length about the filmmaking principles that inform his work.

Where’s she from anyway? The outback? The moon? Worse. L. A. - friends of Rhonnie (Thea Gumbert) in Sally Marshall is Not an Alien At the end of the twentieth century, there was more than one reason for Aus...

Over the past two decades, Rolf de Heer has arguably emerged as Australia’s leading active narrative filmmaker: excepting one or two figures working mostly outside this country, none of his contemporaries can m...

The fabulous was Jim Sharman’s birthright. Grandson and son of successive managers of the legendary Jimmy Sharman’s Boxing Troupe, he fills the opening pages of this remarkable memoir with vivid recollections o...

Every film lover in Australia owes David Stratton an enormous debt of gratitude. He was largely responsible for the growth and success of the Sydney Film Festival, which he directed for 17 years; he did alm...