Find out what's in store for this year's festival.
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What's in store for BOFA 2023
BOFA Film Festival has had many different faces in its 14 years of storytelling and screenings to film lovers around Australia. Over those years we’ve explored multiple themes such as 'World Stories', 'Creating Wonder' and 'Climate Action'. We've held the festival in May, June, and even November and this year the festival is welcoming in Spring from 1-3 September.
So, in keeping with our reputation for creativity and change, we have not one focus this year but FIVE! You'll be stimulated with Feature Films at the Village Cinemas, or you can walk down memory lane with our Classic Films at the Annexe Theatre UTAS. There will be a cornucopia of Animations for young and old at the Queen Victoria Museum (QVMAG) as well as a series of local, national and international Shorts, including the shortlist from
the 2023 BOFA Short Film Competition also at QVMAG. And finally, complementing this smorgasbord of storytelling, you will be able to indulge in place-based film Experiences in historic venues and restaurant locations around Launceston.
No matter how you choose to enjoy this year's festival, you'll get to experience the BOFA Effect at every turn.
Take a sneak peek at this year's lineup.
The BOFA film selection team are proud to announce that we have won the rights to screen EO (recalling, of course, Eeyore from AA Milne’s tales), a story of a grey donkey with melancholy eyes, who
encounters good and bad in his journey through life, experiences joy and pain, and endures the Wheel of Fortune. Set in present-day Poland and Italy, EO has a modern “road movie” feel, as he wanders across a Europe populated by farmers, football fans and French countesses, adrift on the tide of fate. Bringing together a cast including the mighty Isabelle Huppert as “The Countess”, EO is the Winner of the Cannes Jury Prize, Polish Academy Award for Best Film and the New York Critics Best Foreign Language Award. EO is a donkey-driven drama that'll stubbornly stick with you long after the credits roll.
WATCH THE EO TRAILER HERE >
Happy 40th birthday, Monty Python–The Meaning of Life. Hang on a moment – it’s hard to believe it is 40 but by any standard this film is certifiably a classic and is now seen by many as the most fully formed Python film of all time. And it has aged very well. The Python humour has always been hyper-contemporary. They were on the bleeding edge of comedy, reimagining what was acceptable and what they could get away with, throwing every ridiculous idea against the wall and hoping that at least some of it would stick. Monty Python’s - The Meaning of Life is exhibit-A for this style of dark humour about life (trivial really) and death (inevitable): just watch the famous exploding glutton episode, or soldiers on the front line trying to celebrate a birthday
with the “guest” list thinning as they get shot. Dark but enormously funny. And this is precisely the quality that hasn't aged. If anything, the world has only got worse.
BOFA 2023 is thrilled to be screening the Oscar-nominated stop-motion animation Lost & Found by Australian Bradley Slabe as part of BOFA’s inaugural Animation and Shorts Festival. Adults and kids alike will love watching the simple story of a clumsy crochet dinosaur unravelling itself to save the love of its life. This film is a stand-out in the two short animation sessions for children.
There are also brave, obscure, fresh and acclaimed sessions of animated shorts for older viewers and three hands-on animation workshops. The program is proudly curated and supported by the animation studio Mighty Nice, who make nice ideas into mighty films for brands and original content.
GO BEHIND THE SCENES OF LOST AND FOUND HERE >
As a proud place-based festival, this year we’re showing local and international feature, classic and animated films, screened in all the usual, and some of the more unusual spaces. Such a place is the Pilgrim Church. Built in 1868 in polychrome brick with stucco dressings it was based on St Peter's
Church, Woolwich. It has a magnificent Tasmanian blackwood organ installed in 1912.
Your experience will start with bubbles and canapes to the uplifting sounds of the organ, then a guided tour led by a local historian, followed by a 60-minute film of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra playing three pieces (by Schumann, Koehne and Paul Dean) on the theme of Fire and Water. The outstanding acoustics of the church and the superb sound system will make this a never to be forgotten BOFA Experience.
All hail the Queen.
BOFA 2023 is proud to partner with the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, which is the largest regional museum and art gallery in Australia. The QVMAG Theatre, Meeting Room and Learning Centre will be the home for our ANIMATED & SHORT films from around the world. Locals and visitors to Launceston for the festival can also spend happy hours wandering through QVMAG’s preserved railway workshop, play with interactive Australia in Space exhibition and travel Tasmania through the lens of HJ King, who used motorcycles last century to reach inaccessible places to document nature and Tasmanian frontier life. Hail – and thank you - to the Queen of regional museums and art galleries
BOFA Bonus - Free Screening
Yes, another FREEBIE for our loyal subscribers! From Academy Award winner Laura Poitras, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a gripping portrait of the art and advocacy of Nan Goldin, told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis.
It’s now streaming exclusively on DocPlay – the BOFA community can try 30 days for free to watch this or any other Docplay film by completing the extended trial detail here. There is no charge if you unsubscribe to Docplay at the end of the extended trial period
HEAD TO DOC PLAY >
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