By Tania Phillips
The Orion International Film Festival is screened in all the trendy places around the world Berlin, and thanks to the director’s mum, Dalveen.
When the Dalveen Film Society revived the 1920s tradition of showing films in their local hall two years ago, they couldn’t have believed that just two years later they’d be hosting an international film festival.
However on January 14 almost a hundred people attended sessions of the Orion International Film Festival at the hall. The event, the brainchild of Southern Downs/Granite Belt born international film-maker Elliot Spencer will only be shown in two locations this year, Dalveen at the start of the year and the cosmopolitan arts city Berlin later.
Film Society president Jo Anderson said given the interest and success they are now hoping that they can host the festival each year.
“Elliot Spencer, who is the director of the festival, is a local and he’d been travelling the world,” Jo said.
“He’s a film maker and he’s done all sorts of really interesting things all around the world. He’s come back to Warwick, he grew up in this area, and he was really keen to do something locally. But obviously there’s not a lot of places to screen cinema around here. It was through his mum that he heard about our film society and he got in touch with us through our facebook page, came up and had a look at our facilities and just loved what he saw. He loved the whole premise of the little community film society and the fact that we have really good community support.
“We do have really good facilities, I have to thank the Dalveen Sports Club and the Dalveen Firebrigade for putting all that money together to put all the equipment in.
“So we just started, having conversations.”
Elliot had been running a film festival in Berlin for the past five or six years.
“The film festival runs in Berlin over their summer, so I think it’s June/July this year,” Jo said.
“The same film festival he will run in Berlin is the one we ran in Dalveen one Saturday night in January.
“So from Dalveen to Berlin. Obviously we’ve been running as a film society for two years and we’ve had two really successful years. We’ve had incredible support from the local community and the wider Granite Belt and Southern Downs, even people coming from Brisbane and Tenterfield and Glen Innes and Toowoomba.
“We’ve had wonderful support but this is the first time we’ve done something like this. I film festival is quite different because it’s a festival that supports independent film makers. We ran it as a proper film festival.
“Elliot calls for entries he had more than 700 hundred entered to have their film screened and he went through them all. There were a selection of winners. We had a feature film which was a feature documentary in the afternoon then we had short films in the evening.
“Those short films were from China, Iran, Poland, America, Australia – all over the world and the audience members voted and gave some feed back on their favourite films. Elliot is collating that at the moment and we’ll announce the audience winners for those films on his website.”
She said the event was interactive and wonderful.
After its first brush with a film festival (definitely not their last) the group will return to their regular monthly films with the Oscar nominated Mrs Harris Goes To Paris screening this month.
