If you haven’t left fortress-Sydney and joined the clogged traffic on the M4, F3, M5 freeways out of town then here are a couple of things to do besides attending political rallies and spontaneous demonstrations against your particular regional bugbear during the APEC summit meeting :

Stay in and watch SBS TV tonight

                         Julia Zemiro & Brian Nankervis - Rockwizzers
Rockwiz returns (hooray) after a winter break.

And Small Boxes, a film by Rene Hernandez
will also screen late (around midnight) on SBS TV tonight.

                                    Demian Iturra in Small Boxes

Small Boxes is a film by Rene Hernandez and produced by Kristina Ceyton. Small Boxes follows the journey of Alberto Alvarez, a 20-year old Australian Latino who lives with his mother and grandmother in the outer suburbs of Sydney. Alberto works the night shift unloading boxes of fruit and vegetable at the local produce markets. On a trip to buy his grandmother new shoes Alberto notices a 'position vacant' sign and decides to go for the job. But making a change is difficult, and for Alberto it will mean learning about his identity and finding the courage to believe in himself.

Or spend the weekend at the cinema
at the underground film festival running in Sydney.
Watch a promo.


          Paul Winkler, Albie Thoms, David Perry and Festival Director Stefan Popescu

The 2007 Sydney Underground Film Festival will be joined this year by some of the pioneering UBU Filmmakers including Albie Thoms, Paul Winkler, John Clark and David Perry, who first used the term ‘Sydney Underground’ in Australia.
If young experimental filmmakers today think they have it tough, try forming the first ever group in Australia dedicated to making, exhibiting and distributing experimental films. The UBU Films group, which was founded by Albie Thoms, Aggy Read, David Perry and John Clarke operated from 1965-1970, and later became the Sydney Filmmaker’s Co-operative, producing some of Australia’s most important experimental works. The group was named after Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi, a precursor to the Absurdist, Dada and Surrealist movements. The group staged multi-media ‘happenings’, expanded and independent cinema productions, with themes that subverted the status-quo.
The aims of SUFF are all too familiar to the goals of UBU Films 40 years ago. As Albie Thoms recalls: “We were sick of all the talk about the Australian film situation and had begun helping ourselves, financing our small movies and helping each other make them...we decided to screen our films ourselves.”

The 2007 Sydney Underground Film Festival will be premiering Paul Winkler’s playful commentary on pop culture, Pop Kitsch (Paul still only uses only in-camera effects!) and David Perry’s new digital collage film, Dingbats!

I attended UBU Films screenings at the old Greek Community Theatre opposite St Vincent's on Oxford Street, Darlinghurst back in the early 1970s. Albie Thoms shot a lengthy segment of his film about Sydney, Sunshine City, in my flat in Crown Street, Surry Hills. And, a little later on, but still around 1972, we held film nights in the lounge room of our terrace house in Ann Street, Surry Hills where everyone was to bring a 16mm film to screen. On one of these nights, Albie showed his film of Antonin Artaud's Spurt of Blood.

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