Community & Business
23 April, 2025
Quality documentaries on again at third annual Gilgandra Film Festival
The scene is set for Gilgandra's third film festival
Tasty suppers, great social conversation and some of the best films from across the world, across the region and across town will feature at this year’s third annual Gilgandra Film Festival (GFF).
The festival was first held in 2023 when Sydney-based documentary maker Simon Target travelled to Gilgandra to showcase the documentary ‘Warrawong: The Windy Place on the Hill’. That documentary, directed and written by Simon, showcased life of the land for Gilgandra district farmers Sue, and her late husband Brian, Armstrong.
In 2024, the event featured the sequel ‘Warrawong: The Wind Still Blows’ which featured Sue Armstrong again as she takes on life without her husband Brian after his death. The film Kozok: Alone Across Australia also featured along with ‘The Dream of a Horse’.
Starting as a one-evening show in 2023, GFF is now in its second year of being a two-day event with the young filmmaker’s evening on the Friday night now a key component. And Simon, artistic director of GFF, and said it is wonderful one documentary has turned into something much bigger.
Sue Armstrong is the festival director, and said the Gilgandra community has embraced the event.
“It’s a film festival that has happened by mistake, almost,” Simon laughed. “It was an experiment three-years-ago. We wanted to share a film that was shot locally [Warrawong, 2023]. And now (GFF) it has just got bigger and bigger every year.”
“One of those farmers was Sue Armstrong … it’s pretty amazing that you start as a subject of a documentary and then you end up running a documentary film festival.”
Last year, GFF organisers began a programs to teach primary age children how to make short documentaries.
‘Early Harvest Films’ included submissions from Eumungerie, Gilgandra, and Tooraweenah Public Schools, St Joseph’s School and the Gilgandra Shire Library (now Gilgandra Library Hub) Tech Club.
The project has grown to now include 10 schools for 2025, including the School of the Air and an entry from Louth, south-west of Bourke on the Darling River.
The Young Filmmaker’s Evening will be a free event with no ticket required, while the main festival event is ticketed.
“The festival is documentaries, not fiction, not drama, it’s all real films,” Simon said.
“That was a pilot project with a few skills that has grown exponentially.
“Kids, especially that age, are very good at sort of filming their world like in a children before they become self-conscious.
“They are often really good film-makers … you can give them mum’s iPhone tell them to go off and film.
“We get extraordinary footage of a children driving heavy equipment at home and there’s a kid showing us how to catch yabbies is in a dam. I think he’s seven. Incredible stuff.”
Simon said the GFF is unique with the level of community support, including not only purchasing their tickets but also donating second-hand clothes to the Gil Community Op-Shop.
When Simon came back in 2024, he surveyed the audience a little further which led to the 2025 documentary to be shown, ‘The lives of Gilgandra (Local Heroes’ stories told)’. This will focus on three district residents, Barry Chandler, Lucie Peart, and Will Alison.
Barry is a regular GFF guest who lives alone on a property north of Tooraweenah.
Lucie moved to Gilgandra from Canberra to work at the local newspaper when she was in her 20s, before assuming ownership and management of The Gilgandra Weekly soon after. She now has a young family and six rural print newspapers to take care of as group general manager of a stable of publications spanning from Orange to Nyngan. “I’m interested in who is coming to the show,” said Simon. “I got to meet three different characters, who are living in a remote area and facing different sorts of problems.
“We’re showing those films on the night. It’s important to have local films and international films.”
The third main character, Will is a farmer who has survived the drought and the incredible hardship of losing his partner, raising his two children himself while working on his property on the Tooraweenah-Mendooran Road.
Their combined stories deal with issues of isolation, loneliness and raising young children outside of large business challenges.
“I’ve called it ‘Local Heroes’ because they are quite remarkable people in a way,” he said. “People that are fighting the odds.”
Other films on the night will be highlights of the youth program (What Country Children See), a special animated film from Poland (There are People in the Forest) about migrants on the Belarusian border.
The main film (Trouble up River – Mission PNG) is a documentary based in Papua New Guinea, traversing through the Sepik river in some of the most remote corners of the developing country.
Simon gave a little teaser of Trouble Up River – Mission PNG.
“They are priests and nuns from Poland who are in the remote corners of PNG building clinics and schools and dealing with all sorts of issues,” he said.
“One of them get shot by local person and there’s a lot of repercussions when a priest gets shot.
“A girl who is accused of being a witch, and she is saved by a nun. They’re just about to execute the girl in the forest before a nun saved her. It’s a pretty extraordinary film.”
Target said as a documentary-maker, getting the footage for this film was unbelievable as many of these parts of PNG are unsafe to travel to without contacts and protection.
“There’s a network of missionary priests right up for the river into the highlands and they looked after me basically,” he said “So I was able to film stuff you can’t really see.”
Asked what keeps him coming back, Simon said the people.
“I really enjoy the audience,” he said. “There aren’t really many remote rural film festivals in Australia. It’s such a big social event.
“We’ve had official guests coming from Canberra and Sydney, and they are amazed with the crowd. I think we’re probably the only one that displays documentaries like this so it’s quite original.”
He added the friendliness of people in the Gilgandra always impresses him. “We didn’t intend to set up a film festival,” he said. “We just want to screen one film and it just snowballed.
“(It snowballed) because we’ve got these great people (within GFF) and the people from the (Gilgandra) Country Women’s Association behind us and they’ve got their own committee.
“There’s a network of mature aged women are extremely good at organising things. I mean it’s pretty remarkable. They can cater for 200-plus people for dinner (supper).
“I don’t know think there is many film festivals where that happens.”
Simon concluded he always enjoys any trip to rural and remote Australia. “I’m just a typical Australian who lives in the city and knows nothing about the country,” he said.
“And I know it’s a minority of Australian (population) that live in the country but it’s the majority of our country (in terms of area) and it’s amazing. We (city-based people) don’t know anything about it.
“I didn’t think about it (the bush) until I met Sue and I came out and started making films.”
