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The Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF) is an Australian independent film festival featuring mostly genre, controversial, transgressive and avant garde material.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(November 2022) |
The Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF) is an Australian independent film festival featuring mostly genre, controversial, transgressive and avant garde material.
The Melbourne Underground Film Festival was formed out of disagreements over the content and running of the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF). When director Richard Wolstencroft's film Pearls Before Swine was not accepted by the Melbourne International Film Festival, Wolstencroft claimed it was because his film was too confrontational for the tastes of MIFF. [1] As a response to the film's rejection by MIFF, Wolstencroft founded MUFF in 2000 as an alternative independent film festival, featuring mostly genre, controversial, transgressive and avant garde material. However, this is ironic as the cult film Nekromantik was denied from being screened at the festival in 2001. [2] MUFF has been known for controversy with a screening of Bruce LaBruce's LA Zombie gaining worldwide attention including coverage in the New York Times. [3] [4] [5]
Over the years, the festival has been outspoken on the need to make more local genre films, and has championed many issues of freedom of speech and outsider politics and ideas. The festival has also discovered (first world festival to show the work of) Australian directors like James Wan, Greg McLean, Scott Ryan, Spierig brothers, Stuart Simpson, Patrick Hughes, Andrew Traucki, Dave de Vries, David Nerlich, Neil McGregor, Mark Savage and many others. International Guests of MUFF have included Bruce LaBruce, Lloyd Kaufman, William Lustig, Ron Jeremy, American film director Chris Folino, Michael Tierney, Peter Christopherson, Jim Van Bebber, Bret Easton Ellis, Gene Gregorits, Terry McMahon, Larry Wessel and Geretta Geretta.[ citation needed ]
Transgressive art is art that aims to outrage or violate basic morals and sensibilities. The term transgressive was first used in this sense by American filmmaker Nick Zedd and his Cinema of Transgression in 1985. Zedd used it to describe his legacy with underground film-makers like Paul Morrissey, John Waters, and Kenneth Anger, and the relationship they shared with Zedd and his New York City peers in the early 1980s.
An underground film is a film that is out of the mainstream either in its style, genre or financing.
The Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) is an annual film festival held over three weeks in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. It was founded in 1952 and is one of the oldest film festivals in the world following the founding of the Venice Film Festival in 1932, Cannes Film Festival in 1939 and Berlin Film Festival in 1951.
Bruce LaBruce is a Canadian artist, writer, filmmaker, photographer, and underground director based in Toronto.
Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, particularly early ones, relate to arts in other disciplines: painting, dance, literature and poetry, or arise from research and development of new technical resources.
Megan Spencer is an Australian broadcaster, film critic, journalist, media maker, and teacher.
'The Chicago Underground Film Festival (CUFF) is an annual international festival dedicated to the exhibition of underground and avant-garde cinema, video, and performance. It was founded in 1993 by Jay Bliznick and Bryan Wendorf as an alternative to the mainstream film festival circuit, which was increasingly dominated by distributor product."
Volatile Works is a five-member film and new media art collective in Montreal, Quebec established in 2003.
Frank Michael Howson was an Australian theatre and film director, screenwriter, and singer. He directed Flynn (1996) on the early life of Errol Flynn and Hunting (1991). Howson, with Peter Boyle, helped establish Boulevard Films which produced thirteen films from Boulevard of Broken Dreams (1988) to Flynn; besides producing for Boulevard Films, Howson often wrote scripts and directed.
Nathan Christoffel is an Australian film director from Byron Bay, New South Wales.
L.A. Zombie is a 2010 gay zombie porn film written and directed by Bruce LaBruce. It premiered in competition at Locarno International Film Festival in Switzerland in 2010. The film exists in two versions, a 63-minute cut version showcased at various festivals and theatres and a 103-minute directors cut DVD release containing hardcore gay pornography not seen in the cut version.
Pudding Thieves is a 1967 Australian film. It was the first film from the "Carlton school".
Predestination is a 2014 Australian science fiction action-thriller film written and directed by Michael and Peter Spierig. The film stars Ethan Hawke, Sarah Snook, and Noah Taylor, and is based on the 1959 short story " '—All You Zombies—' " by Robert A. Heinlein.
Justin Gene Gregorits is an American writer, editor, publisher, and convicted sex offender. He founded and published Sex & Guts Magazine, an independent arts and culture journal, that ran from 1997 to 2004. Subsequent works include Johnny Behind The Deuce, Sex & Guts Anthology, Sex & Guts 4, Midnight Mavericks, Dog Days: Volume One, Dog Days: Volume Two, Hatchet Job: The Gene Gregorits Reader, and Fishhook. Gregorits' most recent works have been described as having running themes of poverty, sexual deviance, trauma, mental illness, violence, multi-substance abuse and death. He has said that early influences on his writing included Charles Bukowski and Louis-Ferdinand Céline In 2012 he served as the jury head for the 13th Melbourne Underground Film Festival and was instrumental for Donkey Love, a film about bestiality, being awarded Best Documentary.
Kristen Condon is a film and television actress from Melbourne, Australia.
Avant-pop is popular music that is experimental, new, and distinct from previous styles while retaining an immediate accessibility for the listener. The term implies a combination of avant-garde sensibilities with existing elements from popular music in the service of novel or idiosyncratic artistic visions.
Gregory Erdstein is an Australian film director and writer, best known for the indie comedy That's Not Me.
Monster Fest is an annual genre film festival in Melbourne, Australia, dedicated to cult and horror cinema. As of 2017 it is the only genre film festival in Australia to be supported by the federal screen agency, Screen Australia.
Zombie pornography is a subgenre of pornography involving zombies, a type of undead being with uncontrollable appetites but no personal desire. Films in the subgenre emerged during a surge in the 1980s Italian sexploitation industry and saw minor release in the United States the next decade, but their use of zombie sex was primarily to shock the viewer. Film-maker Bruce LaBruce released Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008) and L.A. Zombie (2010), two prominent gay zombie porn films seen by scholars as subverting homophobic tropes about gay life; in the films, zombification is physically similar to AIDS, a disease typically associated with gay men. While zombie porn may be appealing to some because it breaks taboos related to necrophilia, and plays with male viewers' fear of castration, zombies are also ferocious creatures that can destroy their sexual partners. As a result, the genre has remained largely unappealing.
Richard Wolstencroft is an Australian filmmaker and director of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival or MUFF. Wolstencroft also founded the Melbourne BDSM venue Hellfire Club under the pseudonym 'Richard Masters.'
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