AFW + NFSA #63: Sunshine City (1973)

Sunshine City (1973) dir. Albie Thoms. 118 mins.
8pm Tues 27 Feb 2024
The Brunswick Green, 313/315 Sydney Road, Brunswick.
16mm projection. $10 tix on the door.

This month sees AFW pay tribute to Sydney underground film pioneer Albie Thoms with a 16mm presentation of Sunshine City (1973). In equal parts a work of non-fiction, autobiography, and visual experimentation, the National Film & Sound Archive of Australia describes Sunshine City as “a structured diary film which investigates the process of living in Sydney, which uses a repeating light modulation to intensify experiences of light, heat, colour”. Featuring interviews with local friends and acquaintances of the filmmaker including Martin Sharp, Aggy Read, Brett Whiteley and Germaine Greer.

Thoms, 1970: “SUNSHINE CITY will be a record of my responses to the people and places of the city of Sydney. It will show the visual environment and synthesize the sound environment. It will allow the people to speak, and will try and relate their lives to the environment, to try and express the way the environment, the light, the sunshine, the visual stimulation, the cultural history of the city, conditions the lives of people and creates their character. It will be an analytic film, determining its own aesthetic, forcing attention to the filming process, to the materials of the film experience.” – From Polemics for a New Cinema.

The programme will be accompanied by an introduction from Melbourne experimental filmmaker Dirk de Bruyn, for whom the film had a great influence upon its initial release.

PLEASE NOTE! Photosensitive viewers are warned that this film contains intense sequences of flicker and strobe lighting.

We acknowledge that this event will be taking place on Wurundjeri Land. We pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging.