'The year is 2019. A mysterious plague has swept over the earth, transforming the majority of the world's population into vampires. Humans are now an endangered, second-class species, forced into hiding as they are hunted and farmed for vampire consumption to the brink of extinction. It's all up to Edward Dalton, a vampire researcher who refuses to feed on human blood, to perfect a blood substitute that might sustain vampires and spare the few remaining humans.'
Source: http://screenaustralia.gov.au/ (Sighted 24/09/2009).
This article discusses the problems that Australian films face in the big distribution model, and ways that producers have rethought how their films are funded and distributed. To do this it uses the case study of Robert Connolly's Cinema Plus exhibition company. Although there is a historical precedence set for Connolly's self distribution venture, this shift to rethink how Australian films are being distributed and exhibited is certainly representative of a changing reassessment of the porous relationship between production and exhibition, which for some time Screen Australia demarcated in by two separate pools. What Cinema Plus represents is a recognition that conventional big distribution is not always the most effective way to reach the widest possible audience.
'Following Paul Buhle's claims about the inherent utopianism of horror, this essay examines the popular film Daybreakers (2009) as a cultural response to the economic and biopolitical crises of the Great Recession. Ultimately retreating from the dark mirror of its compelling dystopian critique, the film executes its social crisis through the logic of vampiric speciology, immunizing the present against the threat of radical transformation and restoring a “natural” social order. However, the biopolitical writings of Roberto Esposito offer us a way to discern the ineradicable utopian horizon in even this strategy of containment and neutralization.'
Source: Abstract.
