Interview with the Curators of Dark Mofo Films 2015
Dark Mofo is fast approaching to once again revive ancient winter solstice rites facing the darkness to celebrate the light.
Dark Mofo 2015 features a wild selection of music, theatre, performance and exhibitions including large scale public artworks, a five night Dark Mofo Winter Feast, a late-night ceremonial death dance, a new daunting and captivating Dark Mofo Film program.
This year’s film selection will see Nordic mythology intertwined with contemporary Antipodean angst from the world premiere of The Kettering Incident and Valhalla Rising to A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness and Ariel Kleiman’s fable Partisan.
We spoke to Dark Mofo Films curators James Hewison and Nick Batzias about the darkness and angst that looms.
fluoro. Beside the out of comfort zones, innermost soul touching, subconscious questioning nature, how else would you describe this year’s selection? Is there some message uniting the films?
Hewison and Batzias. As diverse as the selection of films is this year, each film brings an audacious, necessarily dissonant cinematic vision to the fore. This has been our MO since we started three years ago, egged on by Mona’s curatorial expeditions as an abiding principle. This year’s – European – Deep North – Australian – Far South film topography has been fermenting for a while now, a conversation that started like a faint buzzing in our cerebral cortex at the first Dark Mofo.
f.Why did you bring viewers this sort of electroshock? What’s your aim in challenging audiences with the films selected?
H&B. Indifference is the worst enemy of any art practice, and hollow provocation is simply boring. Whilst the Dark Mofo Films program is quite small compared to the prestigious leviathans of the Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals particularly it affords an opportunity for audiences to get willingly sucked into the undertow of these filmmakers’ imagined and real worlds.
f.In what way do the films this year confront darkness and death to celebrate light? Is there some uplifting message underlying all this angst?
H&B. Well, we shouldn’t be afraid of the darkness, of fear, of sadness, of pain. If there’s a message, conscious or otherwise, it’s collectivity. The collectivity of fellow cinemagoers that are willing to take risks. And that the citizens of the far Northern Hemisphere are not so removed in their preoccupations from the citizens of the Antipodes.
Hell, if they’re at Dark Mofo in the first place, they’ve already given their passport to the Festival to take them on a trip… and it sure isn’t to Disneyland.
f.This year’s films centre on myths and psychological angst. Do you find the unreal more effective in challenging the mind than the real? Does allegory challenge us more on a subconscious level?
H&B. Whew. The best way to answer that question is get a ticket to A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness then Ben Wheatley’s A Field In England with Roy Andersson’s A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflection On Existence for dessert. But no, I don’t agree at its most fundamental that the unreal is more ‘effective to challenge the mind’ as Wheatley’s ultra low budget incendiary Pinter-esque debut feature Down Terrace is very much set in the ruthlessly ordinary, the everyday travails that challenge and define us.
f.Tell us the hypothetical title and the plot of a film you would write to represent Dark Mofo 2015?
H&B. Already in the programme: A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness. A nameless traveller on a Northern Odyssey + the no-man’s land between heaven and hell + black metal = Dark Mofo Films.
The scene is set for a thrilling journey through the dark and into the light with the variable film selection of Dark Mofo.
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Dark Mofo 2015 is presented by the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) and will take place across various venues in the City of Hobart, Australia. The selection of Dark Mofo Films will be screened from Wednesday 10 June – Sunday 21 June 2015.
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