September’s Subversive Festivals in Sydney
This morning I filled in for Jane Raffan and Tanya Dombkins today and brought you a subversive festival special, I was joined by three directors of three exciting, provocative, original and alternative festivals that are happening this month: Skydreams Festival, Festival of Weird Spaces and Sydney Undergound Film Festival.
My first guest was ideas-man and local music afficianado Nick Hollins. Nick is the creator of Skydreams.com.au, a not-for-profit local website which has a variety of music videos, reviews, gigs and opinion pieces on a range of topics. The website has proved a huge success and has lead to a Nick and Max Skilbeck-Porter co-directing this weekend’s inaugural Skydreams Festival, a celebratory music & culture event headlined by Darren Cross, Regular John and the Holy Soul, at Hermann’s Bar, 3pm Saturday 8th September.
Thereafter, we were joined by Chris Lego, director of Festival of Weird Spaces. Chris is also known for having founded Reclaim the Lanes, among other events, and is curating the Sydney Fringe Festival’s opening night party next Friday. The Festival of Weird Spaces will be recontextualising and appropriating some common spaces of the inner west by bringing arts and culture to new and weird locations. The events include ARTCORE Guerilla Art Markets on 12th Sep., Decoration Wars on the 14th Sep. and the FOWS Pop-Up Festival of wholesome and hungover fun on the 15th Sep.
We rounded up the show with a phoner with Stefan Popescu, director and head of programming of the Sydney Underground Film Festival. The SUFF is one of my personal favourite film festivals in Sydney, the films are challenging, provocative, subversive and outrageous. It only runs for four days, but the program is packed full of incredible films from all over the world. SUFF is also expecting the first every public appearance of the very controversial Mr. Doodleburger who rose to internet fame after re-dubbing episodes of Home & Away to make the character of Alf into a psychopath. The SUFF opens this Thursday 6th September and runs until Sunday 9th September.
Thanks for listening, if you’d like to hear more from me, my usual show is somethingelse897fm.wordpress.com
– Maren Smith