Bryan Brown, patron of the Sydney Lebanese Film Festival with the festival organisers
the films they might want to show, although they
always seem to come up with films, so they can cope
with it somehow. Obviously, the more access you
have to cinema, the better it is, so I'm all in favour of
it.
On the topic of foreign film festivals, is there a
language that you would love to learn how to
speak?
Oh my gosh, there must be lots… because I’ve just
spent two weeks in Turkey, Turkish! And I say that
because I’ve just been there. I can go to most
countries in Europe and I know some words and can
probably find my way, but Turkey, the language is so
different. At least it has the same alphabet but the
language is so different, I couldn’t even say thank
you. In most countries like Germany, France, Italy
and even Hungary and Poland, I know how to say
thank you, but in Turkey I couldn’t learn how to say
to thank you, it’s so complicated! So I’d love to learn
Turkish.
Do you think the system of film distribution need
to be changed so that there are more opportunities
for international films to be seen in Australia?
It's now very difficult for film distributors - it's at a
crossroads, nobody knows where it's going to go... It
used to be that if you bought a French film, an Italian
film, or Swedish film for Australia, you were safe in
the knowledge that after the cinema release, you
could sell it to SBS - not any more. When I was
programming films on SBS, we would always buy
almost everything. If a distributor had invested in a
film to bring it to Australia, SBS would almost
without exception buy the film for television. Today,
I'm told, they don't buy any. The only films that SBS
buy are the ones they can buy directly themselves
from the producer without a local distributor, and I
think that is very sad, really... SBS used to be a
fantastic place, and it's not so good now, I don't
think...