For many years now, the annual Gold Coast Film Festival has been one of the highlights on my calendar. As an aficionado of animated films, it has been an event I have had the opportunity to meet Makoto Shinkai and watch world and Australian premieres of many Japanese and other international anime features. As a lover of niche films on the other hand, they have often managed to offer quite a lot which appeals to me.
Kicking off at The Arts Centre Gold Coast and involving other events across the Gold Coast, the Gold Coast Film Festival will begin next week, running April 19th to 30th. On offer this year are four world premieres, nine Australian premieres and eight Queensland panels. Should you be interested in doing more than just watching films, they wil be offering a range of events and Q&A’s with special guests. They are also introducing the “Movie Locations Tour”, which will see guests taken on a three hour journey across the region, visiting locations with significance to over 20 films including Kong: Skull Island, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and San Andreas.
There are plenty of films being screened over the 12 day festival, all of which can be read about in their program or by visiting the event page on their official website. I encourage you to check out their line-up, as they do have films which cover a lot of different tastes.
While I will unfortunately not be able to attend many of my desired screenings this year, some of my personal highlights at this moment includes the closing night film Event Zero (Action/Thriller set in Sydney during a highly contagious virus outbreak), My Life as a Courgette (A Swiss stop-motion animation film which explores a child’s journey through a foster home with “insight, wit and charming humour), Out of the Shadows (Hopefully another great Gold Coast Film Festival horror pick which they note as being like “a frightening Aussie mash up of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist”) and the science fiction film The Osiris Child: Science Fiction Volume 1 (From Australian filmmaker Shane Abbess, which follows the protagonist’s journey to find his daughter before the planet they are on is destroyed).
