'If your twenties is the party decade, then Jonah Reid (Ryan Kwanten) is one very high achiever. Impulsive and charismatic, Jonah lives in a crumbling inner-city share-house, surviving off the proceeds of the massive, anarchic house-parties he hosts every week with his best mate Gus (Ryan Corr). All financial considerations and life administration he outsources to fellow housemate Stevie (Sarah Snook).
In the wake of an unfortunate discovery during a one-night-stand, Jonah is diagnosed with testicular cancer. Assured that his life is not at risk, he is warned that his impending treatment will render him totally and permanently infertile. A shell-shocked Jonah goes directly to the sperm bank in an effort to preserve his parenting future, but when his samples fail to freeze effectively, he is left with just one option for parenthood - natural conception. Within the next four weeks!
Suddenly the party maestro ... has a convulsive shift in priorities. With paternal instincts firing, Jonah becomes determined to procreate before it's too late. He barrels back to his ex-girlfriends - starting with Ava (Bojana Novakovic) - but after failing to convince her to drop her life and offer her womb, Jonah contacts just about every girl he has ever known (and some he doesn't) before being given a reality check by Stevie.
Advising him to ditch the ex-girlfriend strategy and cut out the emotional complications, Stevie assesses his options with razor-sharp frankness, lining up candidates and brokering meetings. But as Stevie's efforts as a 'womb agent' stall, and time ticks away... Jonah soon realises that the perfect candidate might be closer than anyone would think.' (Source: Village Roadshow website)
This paper theorises film festivals as distribution circuits, positioning film festivals in the broader cinema ecology to assess their role in delivering local films to local audiences. Recasting current research trends into film festivals through the lens of distribution enables us to see how festivals function as more than another exhibition screen - as a type of distributor. I offer a case study of Sydney Film Festival to explore the following research questions: What is the distributive function and nature of film festivals for Australian films? What happens to local titles following their festival runs? How can we explain the gap between Australian films' continued popularity at film festivals and their continued under-performance in the rest of the marketplace? In answering these questions, this article demonstrates how film festivals have become crucial to both the Australian film industry and the cinema industry at large over the last 10 years, to the point that they have almost replaced the art-house circuit and come to provide an essential, highly specialised distribution channel for small to medium budget films. For this reason, I argue that material and economic drivers are as essential to the current boon in film festivals as cultural ones, and that the film festival circuit has not been able to address the problem of distribution for auteurist, independent and art cinema in an age of digitisation. I present evidence that localises, concretises and specifies festival research, suggesting the major festivals in Australia are an increasingly discrete and self-contained distribution sector within the wider cinema ecology, which has significant implications for theorisations of festivals as feeders for theatrical circuits.
