IMAGINE an adventure film festival where you have your own adventure getting there.
That’s what emerging local film guru Alex Marshall and Darkstar Coffee owner Tim Fraser are promising at the Vintage Adventure Film Series, which is screening in the unusual setting of a warehouse in O’Connor from June 1-4.
Mr Marshall says there’s a creative scene developing in the warehouses as the heavier industries migrate out to Bibra Lake, and bringing the audience into the unfamiliar setting will put them in the right frame of mind for the movies.
“You’ve already created a sense of adventure; you get a feeling of complicity that you don’t get from a cinema,” he says.
“There’s a dance group in Bibra Lake that does it.
“They put on shows, and people really love coming to a cultural event in a setting it’s not built for.”
The festival follows on from the success of his last venture, the Hilton Winter Film Festival, which drew 1200 people out to view four documentaries, including three WA premieres.
“It just goes to show that if you put something of quality into the suburbs, people will come,” Mr Marshall told the Herald.
“I am really interested in this idea and have been inspired by Circus Ashton, which has been going around suburbs in Perth for years, unfunded.”
• Film guru Alex Marshall and Darkstar Coffee owner Tim Fraser say there’s creative passion emerging from the warehouses in O’Connor’s light industrial area. Photo by Steve Grant
Mr Fraser agrees on the suburban focus, and he’s currently applying for planning approval to run a cafe at the warehouse.
He says the aim is to recreate the old-style winery cellar door, where you’d watch the vintner at work while getting a cheap taste of their brew.
He says that’s almost disappeared in the corporatised world of winery tours and nowadays you pay more at the door than you would at the bottle-o.
Mr Marshall says the journeys captured in the films are an eye-opener to how our sense of adventure has been tamed.
It’s hard to imagine in these days of GPS, go-Pros and drones that two blokes headed off on a couple of Ducati motorbikes with nothing more than a map of the world from the newsagent and a film camera, as Tartarini and Monetti did in 1 Map For 2.
In Grass, a way of life now long-gone is captured in amazing images, as 50,000 Bakhtiari tribespeople take their 500,000 goats across freezing rivers and up icy mountain slopes to find pasture.
Mr Marshall says the adventurous spirit in the films has inspired his own adventure. He’s planning to travel cross country on his postie bike to Uluru.
“I thought you had to have the full BMW with all the kit, but then I realised that you don’t need anything like that; you just need a sense of adventure,” he says. The films are at Darkstar Coffee on Pritchard Street, O’Connor and tickets from trybooking.com
by STEVE GRANT