3rd Adelaide Film Festival

Established in 2003 by the South Australian government, the bi-annual Adelaide Film Festival is the youngest and smallest — but no less ambitious — film event among the more established Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane festivals. The carefully curated festival program, with its 150 fiction films, documentaries and shorts, gave the otherwise cinematographically deprived South Australian audience an unique opportunity to discover over eleven days not only a “best of” selection of the major international festivals such as Berlin, Cannes and Toronto, but also nineteen world premieres, among them twelve Australian productions that had been directly supported by the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund. It is worth noting that many of the Australian films playing at the festival had been partly or wholly funded by this Fund, means by the Adelaide Film Festival itself. This establishes an important trend in supporting filmmakers that other film festivals could well encourage and introduce.

The first Adelaide FIPRESCI prize went to Dry Season (Daratt) by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, one of the films of the New Crowned Hope series.

Adelaide Film Festival: www.adelaidefilmfestival.org