By Ewen McRae
Filmmakers will embrace their inner ghouls at Sunshine Short Film Festival’s most spooktacular edition yet.
This year’s festival, with a theme of “CarnEvil”, will run on Halloween (October 31) and entrants are being urged to turn to the strange and unusual as the focus of their five-minute films.
For festival organiser Steve Pereira, the change of pace from last year’s “Beautiful Sunshine” theme is a reflection of how the festival has grown.
“We first started this festival as a way of celebrating local culture … but as we’ve grown we’ve got more recognition and we can look a bit more broadly,” he said.
“Horror has always been one of the most popular themes in past years, but it’s also about the carnival, the circus and the oddities of human existence … we want to say, let’s bring them out and enjoy the fact that we’ve got so many different, odd, and eccentric people.”
As with previous years, there will be three age group categories – primary school, secondary school and open. The winner of each category will take home $1000, while the judges’ award for the best film overall will win $3000.
“Entries can be anything from 30 seconds to five minutes, so it’s very achievable and we have a wide variety of films each year,” Pereira said.
“What this festival also does is feature people from a wide variety of ethnicities, who don’t see themselves on the big screen or they are in very prescribed roles.
“We get to be our heroes here, and tell our stories the way we want to tell them.”
Details: sunshinefilmfestival.com.au
