Andrew Pike

Festival Director 2017-2024

CIFF returns this year with a Special Event, presenting two restored classics of Australian Indigenous cinema: THE COOLBAROO CLUB (1996) and GREEN BUSH (2005).
With this program, CIFF maintains its retrospective focus, celebrating great films from the past, and especially from Australian cinema. Many of the film festivals that are presented these days in commercial cinemas in Canberra have occasional retrospective elements, but apart from the exemplary Cinema Reborn Festival in Sydney, no major festival in Australia has to date been prepared to go as far as we aspire to go in our future events. For us, it is about pushing the envelope to accentuate CIFF’s difference from the plethora of national film festivals focussing on “the New”, and to give ourselves a truly distinctive place in the local and national film culture landscape.
Our Special Event this year provides a rare opportunity to see two remarkable films on the big screen, in all of their restored glory. In so doing, we are very pleased to once again focus on the work of the NFSA’s outstanding NFSA Restores program of significant archivally restored films.