CINEMA REBORN - BETWEEN WARS a new essay by Quentin Turnour is posted on the festival website

Corin Redgrave, John Chance, Between Wars

Editor’s Note: Below the following paragraphs is the start of a longer version of a specially written piece by film scholar, programmer, archivist and member of the CINEMA REBORN Organising Committee  QUENTIN TURNOUR. The shorter version will appear in the festival catalogue on sale during the festival for $10 or free to subscribers. The essay focusses on the collaboration between director Michael Thornhill and writer Frank Moorhouse. 

A program of films which relates to their early work will be screened at CINEMA REBORN on Saturday 5 May at 2.30 pm. This is one of a number of key programs devoted to important Australian film-makers of the past. 

It is anticipated that Michael Thornhill and Frank Moorhouse will attend the screening and there will be a post-screening Q&A moderated by Mark Pierce

Here are the opening paragraphs of the essay. After that just click through to the website link below. You can also click through from that website to the Eventbrite site which is selling the festival tickets.

Michael Thornhill

Really? Really. Late next year, December 2019 will mark the 50th anniversary of then Prime Minister John Gorton’s acceptance of the Australia Council’s recommendations for funding of the Australian film industry. It’s a clear indicator that the Australian cinema renaissance is well and truly film history. That its nationalist terms and conditionality is largely outmoded, its then bright young makers—for example, its under-honoured, but key creative producer/director/administrator force, Gil Brealey—are now increasingly leaving us, and that it is another country to anything but late middle-age Australian cinephiles. Time also for a rethink about its canon and canonicality.

Frank Moorhouse

For some of these reasons Cinema Reborn chooses in its first edition to present director Mike Thornhill and writer Frank Moorhouse’s Between Wars—one of the sorest cases for re-evaluation amongst the new wave films of the 1970s. We have a few ‘why sos’ for this programming as ‘argument programming’. 

Between Wars page on the Cinema Reborn website