Young at Heart

A flagship event for NSW Seniors Week, Young at Heart: Sydney’s Seniors’ Film Festival celebrates its fifth anniversary in 2010 with a four day program of affordably priced cinema, with tickets just $5 for senior’s card holders.

This year’s festival features everything from the ‘Tough Sheilas’ program – new prints of such Australian classics as The Killing of Angel Street (a 1981 thriller inspired by the disappearance of anti-development and anti-corruption campaigner Juanita Nielsen) and Caddie (a feminist portrait of working-class life during the Great Depression) – to the Australian premiere of Hats Off, an enthralling documentary about 93-year-old Mimi Weddell (pictured) whose acting and modelling career only began when she was aged in her mid-60’s.

A workshop program, short film screenings, and a special preview of the soon-to-be-released The Last Station, a love story about the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy and his wife Sofya, flesh out the Young at Heart program.

Artistic Director Mathieu Ravier tells Arts Hub that the idea of a Seniors’ Film Festival grew out of discussions with seniors who attended other screen culture events organized by his company, The Festivalists.

“We heard the same gripes from them, to do with the fact that they felt both cinemas and festivals catered to an audience that was not them. That was reflected in the scheduling, in the pricing, in the programming to some degree – and it’s true these days that multiplexes are overrun with teenagers, and seniors don’t feel a sense of ownership of either the space or the event,” Ravier says.

The Seniors’ Film Festival was established in response to such concerns, and also in response to statistics provided by Screen Australia, which indicated that seniors are not only the fastest-growing segment of the population, but that they are also the fastest-growing film going segment of the population.

“We thought it was about time seniors had a festival to call their own.”

While admitting that the first such festival was an experiment, Ravier is justifiably proud of the event’s rapid growth over the intervening years.

“It achieved some kind of resonance with the audience very quickly, and so from that point we decided to listen to what the audience had to say, and customize the program to their exact needs.”

As a result, Young at Heart now screens classic musicals which the audience are encouraged to sing along to – this year including Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 classic Meet Me In St Louis, starring Judy Garland, Mary Astor, Margaret O’Brien; and Elvis: That’s the Way that It Is, Denis Sanders’ 1970 documentary about Elvis Presley’s return to the Las Vegas stage – as well as new films by and about the senior experience.

“It’s a mix of new films and some classics – this year we’re working with the National Film and Sound Archive to show a program of Australian films from the 1970s and 80s which have just been restored … We’re calling it ‘Tough Sheilas’, because the films all feature strong women in lead roles. They’re not overlooked films by any means, but by virtue of the prints having just been restored by the Archives, we think they deserve to be shown on the big screen,” Ravier says.

“And that’s one of the reasons the festival has thrived – it’s one of the few places in Sydney where you can see classics on the big screen. Most big cities in the world tend to have a really healthy Cinémathèque, and Melbourne’s a key example of that, but unfortunately in Sydney it’s becoming really hard to see classics on the big screen. The festival had the opportunity to do that, and our audiences have been requesting these titles.”

Of the newer titles Young at Heart is showing, one – the advance screening of The Last Station – has already sold out. Another film Ravier expects will attract a strong crowd is Hats Off, a documentary about actor and model Mimi Weddell, who starred in such films as Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo and Rose Troche’s lesbian drama Go Fish, and who died last year aged 93.

“It’s such a vibrant portrait of someone who’s 90-plus and who defies all stereotypes and preconceived notions of what seniors should look and behave like … It follows Mimi as she pounds the pavement going from audition to audition, working incredibly hard to land roles, and she was quite successful, with a career that spanned 40 years. And interestingly enough she only started when she was in her mid-60s, which I think gives hope to everyone out there, you know, that you can have a second or even a third career once you reach so-called retirement age.”

Young at Heart: Sydney’s 5th Seniors’ Film Festival
Dendy Opera Quays, 25 – 28 March
www.youngatheart.net.au