Victoria Treole and Matthew Dabner leave Screen Australia as Tristram Miall returns as assessor
Tristram Miall
Seven screen veterans have been added to the roster of Screen Australia’s project assessors, as two depart, and a revised set of Feature Film Production Guidelines is announced.
The change sees the departure of assessors Victoria Treole and Matthew Dabner after serving out their contracts as Tristram Miall producer of Strictly Ballroom, Children of the Revolution and The Black Balloon returns.
Treole came under fire last month in the Encore comment thread when a film that she was executive producing, Galore, received funding while she contributed on the assessment board.
This whole process is fraught with issues of conflict in an small industry where all compete for Screen Australia feature funding. For 22 years when Screen Australia was know as Film Finance Corporation Australia the system was based upon market place attachments. This meant that no government bureaucrat or panel of creative assessors was used to overrule the corporation’s investment in a film. If it fulfilled the guidelines it got a tick. The new system has provided no certainty to producers. You can spend years on a project and despite the market place attachments still have a bunch of assessors reject you project. It is time that a review was made into the effectiveness of the new regime and a comparison made with its predeccessor. The continuing poor domestic box office of Australian films would suggest that putting a bunch of industry assessors as quality controllers has made no difference to the box office and just antagonised many people in the industry.
Check SQ deep involvement with Iron Sky – check board members – go figure?
Just when you think commercial film production in this country couldn’t possibly get sillier – it just did. AUS commercial film making – by committee.
Curious about one small detail in all this? All these ‘specialist’ people engaged by SA (Tristan Mall included) – this all ‘pro bono’ – or are they ‘retained consultants’ ?