Interview with Sherry Hopkins

This year’s Lotterywest Film Festival feels a little different. For starters, it’s much longer than usual. Spanning five months and featuring 21 feature films from all around the world, this season is the longest yet. More pertinently though, you’ll note that, for the first time in many years, French comedy darling Daniel Auteil is no where to be found. It’s almost incomprehensible.

While the Festival still features a healthy dash of light-hearted comedy, this year’s programme is characterised by its more serious, and more topical entries. “This is a very discerning and intelligent audience, and they want something meaty that they can talk about afterwards,” explains the programme’s director, Sherry Hopkins.

“They want current affairs, and what’s going on around them,” she continues. “As much as they like the occasional little light comedies, and they will like Pain in the Ass, the new Francis Veber comedy, because Perth audiences love Francis Veber [of The Dinner Game] – but as much as they like that, they’re also showing me that they appreciate these more grand scale films too.”

This year, audiences can expect to be shocked by Buddha Collapsed out of Shame, as it exposes the permeating influence of the Taliban through a group of Afghani schoolchildren determined to mimic their parents. They can expect to be baffled by the ridiculous true story at the core of Lemon Tree, in which a Pakistani widow travels to the High Court to protect her lemon grove from Israel’s paranoid Defence Minister. They can expect to be shaken by the Oscar-nominated Katyn, Andrzej Wajda’s powerful drama about the infamous Soviet massacre. All of these films, and many others, are guaranteed to linger with audience members, and to fuel plenty of post-film discussion.

Furthermore, while the Festival Films have always served as portals across the globe, Hopkins argues that this year their reach is also far wider than ever before. “It’s much more of a global picture than usual; I think we’re transporting people more this year. We’ve got two Israeli films, for example, and one Iranian film, Lemon Tree, which is a fine film.”

Despite this evolution, though, the Festival season begins as always, with a couple of lighter films set in familiar, Western contexts. “My hardest job is finding the opening films,” Hopkins confesses, “We try to open with an English language film if we can. We want something to ease people into the program, sometimes perhaps a French comedy. One year we had nothing so I put in Affliction, which was great and won all those awards, but was just too heavy.”

Last week, Sommerville lit up with Young@Heart, a heart-warming piece that sees pensioners reinvigorated by a turn towards punk, disco and rock music. Meanwhile at Joondalup Pines, the British comedy, Grow Your Own, which charts the relationship between a group of “grumpy old men” and the family of asylum seekers that take over a nearby garden patch, has apparently received rave reviews from Joondalup’s large English community. The two films swap locations for the coming week.

For those still uncertain, Hopkins has a couple of recommendations. “I’ve Loved You So Long is the best film in the Festival. Also, apart from the storyline, I think that the style of animation for Waltz with Bashir is amazing, that’s why it’s winning all these awards. You the Living also, is bizarre yet terrific. Every scene is like a picture postcard, and there’s this one scene where a couple get married on a house on train which is just mesmerising.”

In amongst these global stories, Hopkins also disperses a series of West Australian shorts. “I just don’t want to throw in any short with any feature,” she warns, “they’ve got to work together; usually it’s in terms of fitting the subject matter together.” Hopkins also hopes to one day premier a W.A. feature film, but in the meantime one aspect of the festival remains unchanged; its commitment to delivering fascinating stories from all across the globe to the most isolated city within it.