Melbourne film-makers headline film festival

SCINEMA regularly plays to tens of thousands of people across Australia, and in 2008 the program, which explores topics from climate change and human health to natural history, also includes a number of films from Melbourne-based film-makers.

The youngest of the film-makers whose works appear in SCINEMA is 10 year old Kristian Lang from Ascot Vale Primary School, whose six-minute film Mungo Man, which began as a class project on ‘wonders of the world’, explores Australia’s contribution to the evolution debate. “I thought Mungo (in western NSW) was a wonder because of the interesting geography and landscape there and because it’s one of the oldest traces of ritual burial in Australia,” he says.

Kristian made his film – which will also screen in India, New Zealand, and at Cambridge University in the UK – on iMovie on his home computer using photographs he took on a family holiday to Mungo.

Kristian’s film plays alongside documentaries from some of Australia’s greatest film-makers, including Klaus Toft from the ABC whose film Thunderheads follows a daredevil group of storm-chasers as they try to understand the role clouds play in climate change.

Also from the ABC film unit comes The Big Blue, a stunningly-shot documentary about the blue whale which won the Cine Golden Eagle at the Earth Vision Festival for Melbourne film-maker Jeni Clevers. 

Filmed over the four-month breeding season of the Tasmanian Wedge-tailed Eagle, Wild Tasmania, from University of Melbourne student Jasper Montana, exposes the plight of the endangered bird and its perilous position in the middle of the logging and pulp mill debate currently raging in Tasmania.

SCINEMA (pronounced with a long ‘i’ to emphasise the science behind the cinema) is a partnership of the CSIRO and Cosmos Magazine, and aims to promote and raise the public level of science literacy.

The Festival screens at venues across Victoria including the Melbourne Museum, the Box Hill Institute of TAFE, the Mornington Peninsula Astronomical Society and the Mornington, Hastings and Rosebud Libraries from August 16 – 24.

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