Dr Stephen Morgan

A new year is supposed to be about looking forward, rather than looking back, but I was distinctly slack at posting updates across 2024, so here’s a quick round-up of some of the things I’ve done over the last twelve months.

Scroll on for an update on the film curation and programming work I did in 2024, or check out the other 2024 in Review post, which focuses on writing and film criticism.

JEFF BARNABY: THE ART OF FORGETFULNESS
@ CINEMA REDISCOVERED

Although the majority of my curatorial energies were, once again, taken up by my first love – the London Australian Film Society and Festival (see below) – one of my favourite things of 2024 was getting to collaborate with Adam Murray from Bristol Black Horror Club on a very special retrospective tribute to the Mi’gmiq filmmaker Jeff Barnaby, as part of Cinema Rediscovered‘s Other Ways of Seeing programme (and with particular thanks to CR’s Maddy Probst).

As with my previous efforts to celebrate the legacy of David Gulpilil a couple of years ago (via talks, articles and film curation), it felt particularly important to ensure that Barnaby’s films, which had so much to say about colonialism on Turtle Island, were put in front of British audiences. That they were also arse-kicking genre films helped, of course!

Titled Jeff Barnaby: The Art of Forgetfulness, our survey of this singular, but all too brief career – he died in 2022 at the criminally young age of 46 – included his two features, residential school revenge thriller Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013) and zombie reversal narrative Blood Quantum (2019), as well as a short film programme and discussion.

Barnaby saw horror as a ‘gateway drug to better conversations’, and in that spirit, I also wrote a piece for the BFI website highlighting Where to Begin with Native Horror. Likewise, for those in the UK interested in seeing Jeff’s work, here’s a quick primer of where to find his films (minus Rhymes, which is unavailable on streaming at the moments):

• His first short film, From Cherry English (2004) is a surreal allegory for language loss and recovery, and can be seen over on Isuma TV;
• 2007’s ambitious The Colony blended body horror and Kafkaesque nightmare, and can also be seen on Isuma TV;
• Likewise, Barnaby’s skin transplant sci-fi horror File Under Miscellaneous (2010) is also on Isuma TV;
• Made for the National Film Board, Etlinisigu’niet [aka Bleed Down] (2015) is a poetic archival interrogation of the myth of a ‘free and fair Canada’, and can be seen on the NFB website;
• Finally, Blood Quantum can be streamed on Shudder, Prime and Apple TV.

* * * * * * * * * *

LONDON AUSTRALIAN FILM SOCIETY & FESTIVAL

Safe to say that the last twelve months were a bit of a whirlwind, curation-wise, not least at the London Australian Film Society where LAFS director Laila Dickson and I co-programmed up a storm!

We started 2024 with a bit of a flurry, pulling together nine events in the first half of the year, including:

• Jan 27: A screening of pan-Indigenous portmaneau film We Are Still Here (2022) at Hackney Picturehouse to mark both Australia Day/Survival Day and Waitangi Day;
• Feb 16/17/18: A lovely Q&A mini-tour of Platon Theodoris’ absolutely delightful indie oddity The Lonely Spirits Variety Hour (2022), for which I hosted three Q&As – two at the LAFS screenings at The Garden Cinema and Finsbury Park Picturehouse, and a third at Rich Mix;
• Mar 3: Partnering with Vertigo Releasing on an exclusive pre-release screening of Noora Niasari’s Iranian-Australian drama Shayda (2022);
• Mar 22/23: Hosting two thirds of the London leg of The Great Australian Punk Rock Movie Massacre tour, featuring two double-bill screenings of Pub: The Movie (2022) – Andrew Leavold’s doco about the Antipodean Robert Crumb, Fred Negro – and trash cinema legend Dick Dale’s dark splattergore comedy Ribspreader (2022). After the late night mayhem of the first screening at the Horse Hospital, I just about managed to hold together the Q&A at the Genesis Cinema the following afternoon;
• Mar 31: We rounded out a busy March with a Q&A screening of documentary Isla’s Way (2023) at Finsbury Park Picturehouse. I missed this one, as I was in actual real-life Australia, but our pal Issy Macleod stepped in to interview director Marion Pilowsky and producer Georgia Humphrey after the film;
• Apr 25: After years (on and off) spent tracking down the screening rights, we finally managed to host an Anzac Day screening of Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981) at Hackney Picturehouse – a screening we may well repeat in 2025;
• May 8: Our retrospective Spring continued on May 8 (maaate), with our 2nd annual screening of Aussie cult comedy classic The Castle at Picturehouse Central. For this year’s 3rd annual screening, we’re heading to Finsbury Park Picturehouse, and tickets are already on sale!

After a well-earned summer break, LAFS returned with the sixth London Australian Film Festival, which featured eight screenings across three venues over one weekend in September, as well as a handful of video Q&As, mostly recorded shortly after crawling out of my sickbed:

• We opened on Thursday Sept 12 at Picturehouse Central with the UK premiere of Rolf de Heer’s very underrated dystopic gem The Survival of Kindness (2022), followed by a pre-recorded Q&A;
• On the Friday evening, we decamped to Finsbury Park Picturehouse for two more UK premieres. First up, Tanith Glynn-Maloney’s short film Finding Jedda (2021) was paired with a lyrical documentary exploration of Indigenous representation in Winhanganha (2023), followed by a pre-recorded Q&A with the film’s director, Wiradjuri poet Jazz Money. Meanwhile, this year’s Friday night future cult film slot was filled by Timothy Despina Marshall’s thoroughly excellent hotel quarantine psych-horror, In The Room Where He Waits (2024);
• Saturday began at Finsbury Park Picturehouse with a family matinee of Glynn-Maloney’s feature debut, the bittersweet Windcatcher (2024), before we headed back to central London and The Garden Cinema for Bromley: Light After Dark (Sean McDonald, 2023), a documentary portrait of one of Australia’s most divisive artists, David Bromley, followed by easily the stupidest film we’ve ever screened (in a good way!), the absolutely bonkers comedy, The Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe (Vaughan Blakey & Nick Pollet, 2024).
• We rounded out LAFF 2024 with the UK premiere of music doc Ego: The Michael Gudinski Story (Paul Goldman, 2023), followed by our closing gala screening (and European premiere) of The Rooster (2023), after which I ‘presented’ actor turned writer-director Mark Leonard Winter with the Cris Jones Debut Feature Prize in a pre-recorded Q&A. Special thanks to our friends at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, who supplied us with Anastasia James’ short film Pebble (2021), which played before the film.

As the 2024 drew to a close, the London Australian Film Society rounded out a busy year with two more screenings:

• Oct 17: We took Andrew Leavold back to the Genesis Cinema for the UK premiere of Film Safari Ghana (2024), the documentary that he made straight after leaving us back in March. This gonzo doc explored the weird and wonderful world of Ghana’s Kumawood filmmaking community, saw Leavold star as a modern day slave master in Ninja’s White Devil: Freedom is Coming (available, in full, on YouTube), and acted as a promo for a (successful!) Kickstarter campaign for his own Australian-Ghanaian exploitation co-production, The Taller They Come.
• Dec 14: We ended the year by heading back to Finsbury Park Picturehouse for our annual Christmas screening and Heath Davis’ dark, bittersweet dramedy, Christmess (2023).

* * * * * * * * * *

KCL STRAND FILM FESTIVAL

I can’t do a post about my recent curatorial work without a special shout-out to the students of my Film Festivals and Film Festival Studies module at King’s College London which, by a quirk of timetabling, meant that we had two editions of the KCL Strand Film Festival in 2024. Obviously I didn’t curate these screenings directly, but as the de facto festival director, I’ll take at least a tiny bit of the credit!

Way back in March, the 2023/24 cohort staged a six-night festival featuring a rarely seen Chinese documentary, a programme of East Asian queer shorts, a curated programme of early shorts by established filmmakers who centre women in their films, the latest feature from Ava DuVernay, an indie filmmaker Q&A (one of whom turned out to be a former QMUL student of mine!), an exploration of the legacies of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography.

Then, from 29 Nov – 8 December, the 2024/25 cohort likewise embarked on a festival that included explorations of ethnic minorities in China, animated tales from around the world, identity through animation, female rage through the ages, the figure of the female spy, and the life and work of William S. Burroughs.

It’s always great seeing the fresh perspectives that our students bring to film programming and curation, and especially nice to watch them continue that work beyond the module – I’m already looking forward to doing this all over again in 2025/26!

* * * * * * * * * *

LOOKING AHEAD TO 2025

The coming year looks as hectic as ever, curation-wise. At LAFS, we’re busy planning the first half of the year, which will include an Australia/New Zealand mini-fest in early Feb (to mark Survival Day/Waitangi Day), the aforementioned 3rd annual screening of The Castle, a return to our usual festival slot in summer, and a bunch of filmmaker Q&As and collaborations that will be announced in good time.

Also still very much TBC, but I’m hoping to make a return to Cinema Rediscovered to present some very exciting 4K restorations in July, and keep an eye out for the launch of a new endeavour that I’m tentatively calling First Reels, which will be dedicated to putting landmarks of Indigenous cinema up on London screens.

In the meantime, I’ll try to post more regular updates as I go!