Colourfest 2011

Overview

As new migrants arrive and travellers return, Sydney folds its terrain over new cultures every day. The results of older collisions continue to shiver like tectonic plates gently unraveling one under the other, creating new landscapes, the occasional shock and some radical shifts of perspective. The Colourfest film festival screens films by and about arriving, arrived and established Australians. In the process it opens up stretches of the city that are talked about a lot, but not always well represented on Australian screens.

The festival is screening first at Marrickville’s Red Rattler, then again at the Riverside in Parramatta, each screening divided into two sessions of shorts. In Session 1, Corrie Chen’s Happy Country charts the collision of cultural dislocation and driving directions, Vessel Safei’s Streets of My Country shows the effects of the Green Revolution being played out for Iranian-Australians live online, in the news and at home, while Marie Setiwan’s Fairytale takes us inside the marriage dilemmas of a Vietnamese-Australian family. The second session’s Rima is a veiled young Muslim woman with a fierce obsession for fast cars, and Maria Tran’s Hot Bread Shop takes you inside the business and history of a family-run Vietnamese bakery.

*The Parramatta sessions are on the 4th of June at the Riverside from 3-8pm, tickets are available here.