On Saturday night, the Jetty Theatre was a packed house for a gala event announcing the SWIFF 2019 festival line-up and program. Over 60 different feature films from 20 countries will hit big screens on the Coffs Coast between January 10th and the 25th.
The night included a screening of one of the festival’s upcoming films, Backtrack Boys, with some of the organisers of Backtrack Youth Works and the at-risk youth they help providing a Q&A after the film to a standing ovation from the Jetty Theatre audience. Backtrack Boys will play twice in the main festival program.
Among the SWIFF 2019 line-up is a first for Coffs Harbour – its first World Premiere. The brand new documentary, Becoming Colleen: Finding The Shoe That Fits, will be screened first in Coffs Harbour before anywhere in the world, with special guests connecting with audiences after the film.
This year’s program strands include international awards winners in the World Cinema program, the best and brightest from this year’s bumper crop of homegrown stories with the Australian Cinema program, big screen surf movies with Call of the Surf, a new program about our connection to music with Music & The Makers, the weird and the wonderful in non-fiction films with Pop Docs, a focus on female-directed stories with Women of Action, as well as a strand on skate films with Make America Skate Again.
Opening Night Gala film Terror Nullius will feature a live Q&A with special guests Soda_Jerk from New York, and the 2019 film festival will close with director Julian Schnabel’s (The Diving Bell & The Butterfly) Vincent van Gogh late-life biopic, At Eternity’s Gate, starring Willem Dafoe and featuring Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen.
SWIFF Live returns again this year, this time with bluegrass band The Mid North providing a live soundtrack accompaniment to one of modern cinema’s masterpieces, the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?
The program is now live at www.swiff.com.au or via the SWIFF 2019 mobile apps for iPhone and Android.