Dungog Festival

The Dungog Festival launches with Australian feature The Infinite Man, a time-travel comedy that opened to great acclaim at the South By Southwest festival earlier this year. It’s an interesting choice, opening a festival with a film that has both feet firmly planted in genre (especially given there are films of greater renown that will also feature, including Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s latest, The Young And Prodigious T.S. Spivet). For Lindsay, though, it was an easy decision.

“I’ve always been into fantasy, bending of reality, a bit of science fiction,” he explains. “For opening night I went with my particular obsession with time travel. I was a Doctor Who fan as a kid and continue to be so, I love it. I went through my late teens and early twenties doing that arty wanker thing, where it had to be arthouse, it had to be Peter Greenaway, all pretty pictures and surreal ideas. Then as I got older, and especially with doing film festivals, needing to please an audience, I realised how much I also just needed to be pleased. I want to be entertained!” he laughs.

Though film festivals are no stranger to Dungog, tucked away in the Hunter Valley, under Lindsay’s guidance this will be the first time the focus has shifted away from a strictly cinema-centric experience. While films will remain the main attraction, the festival will also feature a variety of musicians, local displays and markets to encourage audiences to sample as many sights as possible.

“What we want is to provide people with a really fantastic, enjoyable weekend in the country, and film is a big part of that. But we don’t feel that people need to be trapped in a cinema for three days. They’re in the gorgeous Hunter Valley Shire, there’s so much to see and enjoy. I wanted the film program to have something for everyone, and to be quite accessible for lots of different audiences and be spread in such a way that you can pop into the cinema, pop out to the farmers’ markets, go and see a vintage tractor display, go and see another film, grab a bite to eat, and at the end of the night go and see a band. We want to have people spend a weekend rambling through this really lovely town.”

With the intention to grow over time to branch out into even more areas – photography, visual arts and theatre – the Dungog Festival is on the cusp of becoming one of the stand-out cultural events in regional Australia. The key to its success though, as Lindsay well knows, is not showcasing content that will only be well-received by critics – the “arty wanker thing” – but by finding stories that engage and entertain.

“I think there are two types of film curators,” he says. “You’ve got the critic, and you’ve got the marketeer, and I am very unashamed in saying I am completely the marketeer. It’s not about what I think, what I like. It’s not about me casting my judgement over the offerings here and deciding what is or isn’t a better piece of work, what has more right in getting screen space. I’m about looking at films and thinking, ‘Do I have an audience for this? What story am I telling an audience? If they go and see six films, what is the overarching experience that they’re getting from the beginning of the festival to the time they walk away? What is the story they’re taking from it?’ To me, that is most important.”