Cirrus@Austlit

'It was rather poetic that my first IRL interaction with the festival, on the Sunday of the first weekend, was a much-anticipated, rarest-of-rare screening of The Afterlight (2021). Charlie Shackleton’s film was described in the program as something ephemeral, whose very existence as a single 35mm print only, is entwined with its deterioration. Introducing the film before its first screening, guest of the festival Shackleton noted that the film’s Australian distributors, Conor Bateman and Felix Hubble of Static Vision, had not even yet seen it. Starting with something that explicitly engaged with the ephemerality of cinema, and the cinematic experience, was apt. The Melbourne International Film Festival had been stalled by Covid restrictions not once but twice, thanks to Australia (in particular the festival’s home state, Victoria) having some of the most extensive periods of lockdown across the globe. This was impacted, particularly, by a snap lockdown in August 2021 that led to the cancellation of the entire in-person festival and its replacement in the lacklustre form of an online slate, made severely disappointing, at least for me, by an inadequate and often broken digital viewing platform that had not improved since 2020. With this being MIFF’s first return to an in-person festival with screenings, talks, events, and all other accoutrements since August 2019, my varied experience of it was, as with any other year, enriched by a memorable web of thematic connections between films and to life.' (Introduction)