Adelaide Film Festival Senior Programmer. Associate Programmer, International Functions, Tribeca. Curator, First Films. African Film Festival Australia Consultant
“We need to have a truly diverse program for the audiences we have and the audiences we want,” said Paul Struthers, adding that the 2024 Adelaide Film Festival will be his first as a senior programmer. “I’m very excited,” he said. .
Mr. Struthers was drawn to film through the short-lived British film magazine Neon, which he stumbled upon with a newspaper in Glasgow as a child. He held positions at Odeon Cinemas, sales company Renaissance and British distribution company Revolver before moving to Australia in 2009.
Struthers looks outside the typical route for new discoveries. Letterboxd was a favorite hangout, and when the director of the 2014 Mardi Gras Film Festival got paid, he was typing “queer movies” and related search terms into Google News every day.
He participated in San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ festival Frameline in 2017, and after returning from the US served as a program consultant for the Sydney Film Festival from 2020 to 2023. Coach Nashen Moodley stands out among many coaches. advice. And he’s kind. ”
Struthers’ passion for “important, bold, funny and challenging” debut films and the annual Emerging Directors/New Works Festival at New York’s Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art has led him to bring First Film Fest to Sydney in 2022. This gave me the opportunity to launch it. The 2023 edition included “The Taste of Mango” by Chloe Abrahams and “Viva” by Rebecca Hunt.
“When you hear there’s a movie[in a festival]it’s like winning the lottery. Sometimes it takes six months,” Struthers says. “But it’s getting harder and harder to let filmmakers know they’re not being chosen.” It’s even harder now that Struthers is also a producer. He is currently producing Australian director Craig Boreham’s Down the Hume.
Contact: Paul Struthers
