FILM FESTIVAL PROGRAMMING
For over half a decade, I have had the opportunity to work at some of the biggest film festivals here in Sydney. I started out my career in Volunteer marketing and box office and grow to pitch events, Q&A's and even create a new short film programme.
Below are some of the key initives I had direct involvement in producing:
2017: Launching Mardi Gras Film Festival's Youth Activation Program.
The main goal I had going into this was the execution and implementation of ideas to bring youth to the festival. One of the major events was hosting a panel discussion called The Coming Out On Screen panel which highlighted the stories of three up and coming Australian youtube influencers as they came out to live their true selves and included the director of Coming Out a film that we had that year at the festival.
You can see the full video of the Mardi Gras Film Festival 2017 Launch Here, you can hear my speech at 3:27.
2018: Negotiating and getting access to one of the biggest gay films of the year. Love, Simon.
I helped get the screening rights to 2018’s biggest gay studio film, Love, Simon. This involved writing a pitch deck between Queer Screen and Fox 2000 to explain why there was brand alignment between the two companies and why it would be a no brainer to screen the film at the festival.
The film screened that year at Mardi Gras Film Festival and won Best Audience Award.
You can read the pitch deck here:
2019: Created and programmed the first-ever queer horror short film programme
I successfully pitched to the festival director to get a short film programme slot available to screen queer horror films from around the world. Queer Scream Shorts, was the first-ever short programme dedicated to the weird and wonderful tales of queers. Something that I had noticed when programming was that was not a lot of horrors that would screen in the mainstream short programmes, as the horror films were viewed as being too weird or not complementary to the other films in the programme.
2020: Programmed HaloKween shorts
In its second year, Queer Screen's horror shorts programme had the creepiest and weirdest short film's to ever screen. I had the opportunity to programme going through all the wonderful and scary films that were submitted for consideration to screen in this programme.
As well as pitching events and creating programmes, I have also been a proud member of many different film festival selection committees, including Mardi Gras Film Festival, Queer Screen Film Fest, Sydney Film Festival, Flickerfest, AFIN International Film Festival as well as Scout Film Festival in Boston.