I caught the film programming bug during my undergraduate studies, when I researched, curated, and projected a session of short 16mm Australian government films about migration for the Moving Cultures, Shifting Identities conference in Adelaide, South Australia.
In the UK, I have curated and/or introduced screenings at the British Museum, Kennington Bioscope Weekender (Cinema Museum, London), and South West Silents (Bristol).
Most of my curation work has related to two programming projects:
LONDON AUSTRALIAN FILM SOCIETY & FESTIVAL
Since 2017, I have worked for the London Australian Film Society, where I serve as Co-Programmer (alongside LAFS director Laila Dickson). As well as regular one-off screenings at venues across London, the society celebrates new and classic Australian cinema at the London Australian Film Festival (formerly the OZ Film Festival), held annually at venues across central London.
Highlights have included a sold-out screenings of Sweet Country (Warwick Thornton, 2017), The Final Quarter (d. Ian Darling, 2019) and The Australian Dream (d. Daniel Gordon, 2019), liaising with Rolf de Heer on an anniversary screening of his extraordinary film Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and a David Gulpilil retrospective for the 2022 festival, hosting David Wenham at the UK premiere of his directorial debut, Ellipsis (2017), and introducing British audiences to an array of great Australian cinema.
In August 2019, I curated a special screening for the UK premiere of Partho Sen-Gupta’s Slam (2018). As well as screening a short poetry film by UK-based poet and filmmaker Shagufta K Iqbal before the feature, I also chaired a panel discussion after the film on Muslim representation, Islamophobia, and white supremacy in Britain and Australia.
After a COVID-induced hiatus, I programmed the fourth London Australian Film Festival in November 2022, was centred around a tribute to David Gulpilil, including retrospective screenings, a short film programme, an illustrated talk on Gulpilil’s life and career, and Molly Reynolds’ documentary portrait My Name is Gulpilil, as our opening film. Our 2023 festival took place in September, opening with the UK premiere of Ivan Sen’s slowburn outback noir Limbo, and closing with Jub Clerc’s Aboriginal coming of age drama, Sweet As.
For the latest information on the London Australian Film Society and Festival, visit londonaustfilm.com.
MENZIES SCREENINGS
In 2017/18, I devised and curated a screening series to run in parallel to the more traditional seminar series held by the Menzies Australia Institute at King’s College London. The inaugural series draws inspiration from the seminar series theme ‘Scaling Australia’, and seeks to broaden understandings of the transnational nature of Australian cinema, and of Australia’s place in global cinema. At each event, I give a contextual introduction, and lead a discussion following the screening.
The 2017/18 Menzies Screenings took a broad approach to Australian cinema in a transnational context, focusing on the lives of Australians abroad and Australia’s history of neo-colonialism; post-war migration and depictions of Australia in Italian cinema; collaborative film-making in the Pacific; government funding of anti-immigration films and the politics of discouragement; and, the role of ‘diasporic’ British film-makers in helping to share the stories of Australia’s First Nations Peoples.
For the 2018/19 academic year, I returned to the Menzies Australia Institute to curate and present a second series of screenings, this time focusing on ‘imperial’ and ‘national’ productions in settler colonial spaces. Expanding beyond Australia, this series sought to compare and contrast a postwar British production and a product of the local industry across three national contexts: Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand.
In 2019/20, a third series of Menzies Screenings, focusing on re-centring Indigenous narratives within the settler history/s of ‘Australia’, was unfortunately cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. For Spring 2021, however, the Menzies Screenings returned in an online form, with a trio of documentaries + filmmaker Q&As themed around the Institute’s current theme of ‘Bearing Witness’. That theme continued in the final Menzies Screening series in 2021/22, which also took place online. The Menzies Screenings are currently on hiatus.
If you’d like to hire me to curate or programme a season; introduce or present a one-off screening, festival, or screening series; or help your institution devise and offer a cross-programme screening strand, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Dr Stephen Morgan 