The filming of an unauthorised movie stunt in the middle of Perth's CBD has almost ended in disaster.

Police say the movie involved the filming of a luxury car taking the corner of Hay and Barrack streets at high speed during peak hour last night.

The driver lost control of the BMW and skidded across the street almost hitting pedestrians in the Hay Street Mall.

Police say the mall was heavily populated at the time and it is amazing no one was killed.

Inspector Neil Blair says it appears the producers did not have permission and did not take any safety precautions.

"The 20-year-old driver has been arrested and charged with reckless driving and the vehicle has been seized for 28 days under anti-hoon legislation.

The driver, who is an Indonesian national, is due to appear in court today.

The movie-making company is believed to be Indonesian.

-ABC

'This is a business, not a culture fest," declared Antony I. Ginnane, the president of the Screen Producers Association of Australia, at the organisation's latest conference in November.

In fact, the idea of Australian cinema as a profit-making enterprise is a pure pipedream. As writer Dan Edwards pointed out earlier this year in the online magazine New Matilda, no country in the world apart from the US and India can sustain a film industry without government support.

So culture, in one form or another, is the only game in town. By that measure, how are we doing? You don't have to travel far these days to hear claims of an Australian film renaissance - one esteemed commentator has even labelled 2009 our "best year ever".

With respect, I have to disagree. (My pick for best year ever would be 1976, which gave us Mad Dog Morgan, The Devil's Playground, Storm Boy, Michael Lee's Mystical Rose, and more.) To my mind, only two of the fiction features contending for the 2009 AFI awards really deserve their acclaim.

Warwick Thornton's Samson and Delilah was always going to rank as a media event given its subject matter - romance between indigenous teens in the Central Australian desert. It's a bonus that Thornton happens to be a born filmmaker, with a sure sense of how to use colour, music, duration, and the personalities of his non-professional stars.

The other great achievement was Sarah Watt's My Year Without Sex - puzzlingly left off the AFI shortlist of nominees for Best Film, perhaps because Watt doesn't announce her ambitions in capital letters. Regardless, this witty domestic comedy had more to say about life in the 21st century than any of its competitors, with a lighter touch.

Between them, the remaining AFI contenders represent just about all the worst tendencies of Australian cinema. Comedies don't come any quirkier than Adam Elliott's claymation Mary and Max, a repetitive exercise in passive-aggressive self-loathing that had me gritting my teeth from start to finish.

Equally hysterical in a different way is Ana Kokkinos' Blessed, basically the left-liberal answer to Today Tonight - generously extending its sympathy to such "underclass" figures as a gambling-addicted single mother, two Hansel-and-Gretel kids in flight from abuse, and a gay youth at the mercy of a faceless pornographer.

I wish I liked Rachel Ward's Beautiful Kate more than I do. But the fact is that this tale of incest in the outback starts off with intimations of Southern Gothic and Greek tragedy, then fritters away its dramatic opportunities to the point where almost nothing happens in the present tense.

Robert Connelly's Balibo was a worthy reminder of a shameful moment in history, but hardly rises above the level once expected from a decent TV mini-series.

The film is at its strongest when directly recreating items from the audiovisual archive, provoking questions about the politics of representation that, alas, aren't tackled in any depth.

As for Bruce Beresford's Mao's Last Dancer, this old-fashioned biopic presumably owes its box-office triumph to viewers who look upon Chinese ballet dancer Li Cunxin (Chi Cao) as the kind of nice, handsome, respectful young man they wish their daughters would bring home for tea.

The virtual absence of nominations for Baz Luhrmann's Australia suggests that this epic fiasco has already been deservedly forgotten.

Maybe one day it'll be revived as a camp classic, like Showgirls or Plan 9 From Outer Space.

It's no shame either that AFI voters chose to ignore Steve Jacobs' Disgrace, an earnest literary adaptation doomed to unintentional hilarity from the moment John Malkovich was cast in the lead role of a preening fop.

More than ever, much of the action in local cinema is happening in the low-budget, digital realm, which this year produced such relative successes as Amiel Courtin-Wilson's Bastardy (nominated in the AFI's feature-length documentary category), Joel Anderson's horror mockumentary Lake Mungo and Jonathan Van Der Heide's dour period piece Van Diemen's Land.

None of these movies are perfect, but if there's one thing that Australian filmmakers need, it's the freedom to experiment without worrying overly about the risk of failure - and without being stigmatised as wankers every time they try something new.

Otherwise, we're left with a cinema stuck in familiar modes - the quirky, the worthy, and the plain dull. And in the long term, who wants that?

-The AGE

THE snubbing of Baz Luhrmann's Australia by AFI Awards voters didn't surprise anyone. After all, of the 10 highest grossing Australian films, only three have been nominated for best film and not one has won.

Indeed, numerous producers have previously bypassed the AFI Awards by not entering their films, including Crocodile Dundee and Babe. Why let your local peers insult you with a slap when the global stage beckons?

Consequently, the Australian Film Institute has recently introduced the box office achievement award. It is a make-good that only draws attention to a glaring problem for the local film industry: in essence, it recognises the film that Australians liked but at which the industry sniffs.

In broader terms it only highlights the inability of the Australian film industry to relate to its audience or the broader socio-political environment.

Luhrmann's film, which will win the box office achievement award by $20 million or so, received five AFI nominations, for sound, original score, production and costume design and for supporting actor Brandon Walters.

But the shunning of Mandy Walker's cinematography, for instance, a year after the Film Critics Circle of Australia adjudged it the best of last year, is gobsmacking. Australia clearly wasn't judged on its merits. Or its merits were obscured by the thought the film's budget was $100m more than the next biggest budget (Mao's Last Dancer's $25m).

Luhrmann doesn't seem bothered. As he noted at last month's IF Awards in Sydney, the audience loved it. He makes films for them. But one year on from the release of Australia, which earned $37m here, the silence surrounding the film remains astounding. The second highest grossing film in Australian history appears to be the Australian film industry's shameful secret.

There have not been media discussions about its commercial success beyond the first month of Australia bashing after its release late last year. The West Australian's Mark Naglazas was typical, writing in November 2008 that it was "a film of such unrelenting awfulness that it will struggle to return its massive budget".

Many even revelled in the film's failure at the US box office, although it has since sold more than 1.7 million DVDs in the US and earned more than $US200m ($220m) in global cinemas.

Of course, popular success doesn't always equate with quality but it is a rather potent measure of merit, whether you like it or not.

Yet Australia baiting remains the laziest of film journalism sports. Last week, The Age's Jake Wilson wrote: "The virtual absence of [AFI] nominations for Baz Luhrmann's Australia suggests that this epic fiasco has already been deservedly forgotten."

Should it be forgotten or should wiser heads be asking why it worked? Given its box office and DVD sales here, it is reasonable to suggest Australia has been seen by more than five million Australians. Yet the film is blithely dismissed in the media as a debacle.

"It seems to me that Baz is a victim of people falling in love [with him], he can do no wrong, everything's fantastic and for the very same reasons they all love him, they all start to hate him," says Jane Campion. "But he persists and isn't he amazing, he's lasted."

Sections of the media and the public came to despise the film after Twentieth Century Fox's relentless marketing campaign. Certainly Australian exhibitors were concerned the public had been turned off the film and rival distributors still believe Fox manufactured a media embargo that was broken only by positive reviews in News Corporation newspapers (er, not here).

But the film industry's own reluctance to cite the film as an achievement is disturbing.

It's reminiscent of the film industry's skittishness when Working Dog's debut film, The Castle, became such a box office hit and cultural phenomenon. Or The Wog Boy. They didn't win film festival awards in Europe. While no one needs to defend Australia as perfect, no one in the industry even discusses the film as a casestudy of what the industry could be.

At last month's Screen Producers Association of Australia conference in Sydney, one session explored the making of the film's tie-in with Tourism Australia, but no one assessed the making of the film, its marketing or its appeal.

SPAA president Anthony Ginnane spoke of the film as a footnote. "Perhaps collectively our ability to read the marketplace and audience appetite has been so dulled by the subsidy drug that we have completely forgotten what audiences want," he said.

"Mao's Last Dancer, with a fantastic Australian gross of $13,975,651 to date, like Australia, proves that melodrama, not social realism, is the genre our would-be screenwriters should be studying."

It is unlikely Australian screenwriters will study Luhrmann's film.

Australia's year out of the spotlight is a stark reminder of the disconnection between the film industry, and to a lesser extent the media, and its audience.

There have been many other reminders this year. The creative community has failed to engage the broader community on the issues of social inequality raised in Samson and Delilah.

In his defence, director Warwick Thornton is not a polemicist. But surely others might have leveraged the indigenous film for greater good?

Other examples of the film industry's blithe ignorance, or even contempt, of the society around them abound.

At the IF Awards, Mary and Max producer Melanie Coombs noted with some joy that more people had seen Adam Elliot's animated film in France than in its homeland, as if that vindicated the film.

This year, Beautiful Kate director Rachel Ward wrote an opinion piece in The Sydney Morning Herald lamenting that not enough Australians embraced her little film and that such films should be protected and loved. She didn't address the notion that word-of-mouth for a film that implicitly accepts incest among teens would not be strong.

Like so many Australian films, Beautiful Kate hung on a couple of wonderful performances, including a cracker from Bryan Brown, and cute cinematography. Ward should take her $1.6m box office and run.

And as far back as last year's AFI Awards, The Black Balloon's director Elissa Down and co-screenwriter "Jimmy The Exploder" whined while accepting their awards that a Melbourne journalist didn't like their film. That The Black Balloon would not win one AFI award if it was up against this year's competition makes the outburst look even more childish.

After many years covering the Australian film industry, I'm resigned to hearing about financing models gone awry and from creatives complaining the system doesn't work or people shouldn't knock them. These cries have been constant since the late 1970s. The problems are the same, only the names and subsidies change.

I fear the struggle will forever be a problem for an industry fighting for space against the cultural behemoth, Hollywood. We'll have our little wins but it will be a never-ending battle. But we should revel in every win, not play favourites.

My real fear about the Australian film industry is that many of the wrong people are in the battle; people who feel entitled, protected and above criticism. People who whine when things don't fall their way and blame others when their own work doesn't succeed. People who don't have a clue about the world in which they live and the people to whom they're trying to tell stories.

I'd go so far as to say people who inhabit the TV and radio industries are far more dynamic, progressive and engaged. Which is not to dismiss an entire film industry, just large parts of it.

A week before the release of one local film, I asked its director if he was nervous. After years developing and making the film, one week before it hit cinemas he was asking himself for the first time, who would want to see his film? He'd made a film without considering his audience. Some auteurs can get away with that. Probably 10 to 20 globally.

It wasn't the first time I'd heard such myopia from an Australian director. Fortunately, a couple of months later another director, David Caesar, told me how privileged he felt every time someone allowed him to make a movie. He felt great responsibility to those providing the money and to an audience. Not enough Australian filmmakers do.

Even worse, the Australian film industry doesn't always acknowledge those who deliver on that responsibility.

It's an attractive belief because it supports the idea that quality is a function of productivity.

The trouble with it is it excuses bad films as inevitable. It's the iceberg syndrome - the good films are somehow propped up by less visible, often less watchable ones.

This is dangerous thinking. The notion that there is a ''critical mass'' of bad films that needs to be reached for the good ones to emerge is a symptom of the Australian film industry's wildly erratic track record.

Put frankly, because too few good films have been produced in the past 25 years, people have become conditioned to accept an unacceptably high rate of failed films. It's as though mediocrity was somehow mandatory.

If only 10 films come out in a given year, there is no reason why they can't each reflect the range and quality we see this year. The only argument against such thinking is performance anxiety, also known as Australia's favourite syndrome, cultural cringe.

Talk of quality ''cycles'' and hit-and-miss ratios entrenches a key weakness in the local industry, which is consistency. Australian cinema has never been all that good at follow through. Rather than gearing the culture to continually improve its quality and expand its reach into the audience, it has become received wisdom that, like the seasons, crop yields must alternate between bumper and bummer. It also sells our filmmakers short. The number of great films this year owes nothing to the number of films made or the operation of cycles but to the rather obvious - and basic - fact that they were made by accomplished, passionate artists who know how to tell great stories.

In stark contrast to previous years, many of this year's films share narrative qualities too often lacking in Australian films - forward motion, third acts, character arcs, clarity of vision and satisfying emotional resolution.

Even Samson and Delilah, the acclaimed downbeat drama about two petrol-sniffing Aboriginal teenagers, has a third act, something writer-director Warwick Thornton insisted upon.

''With this film I needed a happy ending,'' he says. ''I am the audience and if you take the audience to dark places then they need some bright places as well.''

The above-average commercial success Australian films enjoyed in 2009 was due chiefly to the performance of Australia ($37 million), Mao's Last Dancer ($15 million) and the Paul Hogan comedy Charlie and Boots ($4 million). They offer sound examples about the importance of marketing and the value of genre.

Whatever one's critical quibbles, Australia did the industry a huge favour by providing an exaggerated example of the type of marketplace profile too many local films lack. Designed for a big audience, Baz got the buzz going more than a year before the film's release, which built to a pitch that made it the second-biggest local film in Australian box-office history.

Mao's Last Dancer, too, was subjected to a carefully planned branding campaign. ''The films I've made that did the best were, without exception, the best marketed,'' its director, Bruce Beresford, says.

Yet this year we again saw high-quality Australian films bite the dust because people didn't know about them. Cedar Boys, Two Fists, One Heart, Lake Mungo, Last Ride, Mary and Max and Van Diemen's Land all deserved much bigger audiences.

Two examples stand out.

That Sydney Film Festival favourite Cedar Boys, an excellent drama about drug dealing in Sydney's western suburbs, was released in Melbourne during this city's film festival was a prime - and singularly distressing - measure of the gulf between good filmmaking and lack of marketing nous.

Far more revealing is the fate of Lake Mungo, a superbly directed genre film almost nobody has heard of. This ingenious ghost story disappeared without trace, making a negligible $16,000. Yet it is a far more effective horror film than the amateurish Paranormal Activity, which is enjoying huge success due mostly to skilful marketing and word-of-mouth. Only when a buzz-worthy film such as Lake Mungo can be seized upon in a similar manner and enjoy comparable exposure can the Australian film industry be said to truly have its act together.

The news that Australian films seeking support from Screen Australia must devote a substantial portion of their budgets to marketing is a long overdue correction to a flaw that has claimed too many good Australian films.

''Marketing is part of the storytelling and it becomes way, way more urgent or important now than it ever was,'' says George Miller, the director of the Mad Max trilogy and Happy Feet and AFI patron. ''You don't go to the cinema out of habit any more,'' he says. ''You only go when there is something special.''

That most of this year's films are genre-driven also proves - as did The Proposition, Kenny, Wolf Creek, Muriel's Wedding, Priscilla and Crocodile Dundee - that embracing the conventions of genre can enhance rather than diminish the Australian character of a story.

Says Miller: ''When we did the first Mad Max, what was really, really interesting is that when that film went out to the Japanese, the French and around the world they saw it as a distinctive Australian interpretation of genre. One of the implications of genre is that you're engaging; the implication of all these Australian films we're seeing is that people are thinking of an audience. In the past that's been something that people have looked at as pandering. They use words like 'you're selling out'. That never makes sense because what's the point of doing anything if there's no engagement?''

-The AGE

Forget the freakish success of Australia and Mao's Last Dancer - the local film industry is in deep trouble.

The nominations for this year's Australian Film Institute awards were announced last month with much hoopla. It was a ''milestone year for Australian film'', the AFI claimed, ''with box office figures exceeding $65 million''. To celebrate this ''remarkable year'' for the local industry, six nominees for best film instead of the traditional four were announced. Those films were Balibo, Beautiful Kate, Blessed, Mao's Last Dancer, Mary and Max and Samson & Delilah.

By most critical reckonings it was an impressive list, even if the most popular local film of the year, Baz Luhrmann's Australia, was not on it. But it was also a list that masked deep problems. To put it bluntly, the Australian film industry is in deep crisis.

Earlier this month, the annual powwow of the film and television production industry, the Screen Producers Association of Australia conference, heard that local film production is set to dry up in the year ahead, while foreign productions will stay away in droves.

According to producer and association president Antony Ginnane, what's at stake is much more than a temporary downturn. ''We're starting to look at a tipping point for a sustainable industry in terms of the infrastructure and the number of people working in it,'' he told the conference.

In other words, if there are not enough films being made to keep people employed, they will find work elsewhere - either overseas or in a different industry. And if you haven't got the people with the skills, you haven't got the ability to make films if things pick up. It's a vicious, downward-spiralling Catch 22 and we're right on the brink of it.

The immediate cause of this sorry state is the global financial crisis. While the financial crisis may appear to be over for much of the economy, the long lead time of film production means the worst lies ahead for the sector. Thirty-eight Australian features were released in the 2008-09 financial year but, Ginnane says, 2010-11 will likely see just nine.

Worldwide, the industry is in downturn, with banks and private equity shying away from the risky, though glamorous, realm of film finance. But according to Ruth Harley, CEO of peak funding and policy body Screen Australia, some of the issues facing Australia are endemic.

Chief among them is the near-parity of our currency with the US dollar, which means Australia is no longer a cheap place to film for Hollywood studios. Take the case of Green Lantern. In April, NSW Premier Nathan Rees proudly announced the DC Comics adaptation would be filmed at Fox Studios in Sydney, with a budget of $US150 million. It would, he claimed, create about 500 jobs for the state. But by October the film was gone, a victim of the rising dollar.

In April, the film's $US150 million budget bought about $A208 million worth of Australian talent, time and facilities. By the time Warner Bros decided to move the production elsewhere, the same budget was worth just $A163 million - a 22 per cent blowout before a single frame of film had been shot.

According to Hollywood-based film financier Isaac Palmer, Australia's desirability as a filmmaking destination is also being held back by the fact our tax rebate is no longer competitive. Foreign productions filming in Australia qualify for a 15 per cent rebate on local expenditure. By contrast, Palmer says the depressed US state of Michigan now offers a 40 per cent rebate against film production. ''And you get an extra 2 per cent, to pay for security, if you're willing to film in particularly unsavoury neighbourhoods.''

None of this would matter particularly if the local industry were strong enough to exist on its own merits. But it isn't. Although this year has been hailed as a strong one for Australian films, that $65 million cut of the box office is just 6.5 per cent of the roughly $1 billion Australians spend each year at the cinema.

That's better than the 10-year average of 4.4 per cent, but it's a long way from the 41 per cent audience share French films enjoy at home or the 31 per cent UK films have in their own market. (American films accounted for 97 per cent of the US box office in 2008.)

If Australia ($38 million) and Mao's Last Dancer ($14 million to date) are excluded from the take, the figures look decidedly anaemic - at best, about $20 million between all the other Australian films released.

Only Samson & Delilah has made a profit at the local box office. It has taken about $3.2 million on a budget of $1.6 million. (Australia, which cost $130 million, has taken $211 million globally.)

In the past, Australian films might have looked to overseas markets, TV and DVD sales to help make up some of the shortfall. But these avenues are drying up too, with foreign distributors unwilling to pay much for Australian films that are perceived as having only limited appeal, a TV sector struggling in the face of emerging video-on-demand technologies, and DVD sales - ''The studios' most profitable product line,'' according to Warner's worldwide head of digital marketing, Stephanie Bohn - being hit hard by piracy.

As Screen Australia chief Ruth Harley puts it: ''There are no pre-sales, there's very little bank gap [loans against expected revenue], there's very little money in distribution, and there's very little money in [foreign] sales agents. Our section of the industry would have been absolutely devastated by the closing down of the film production industry around the world without the producer offset.''

The producer offset is the Federal Government's main strategy for forging a self-sustaining film industry. Rather than giving grants to films, it offers producers a tax rebate of up to 40 per cent against expenditure. The intention of the scheme, introduced in 2007, was to create a two-pronged funding approach, whereby low-budget ''independent'' films received direct funding from Screen Australia plus the offset, while more commercial, mainstream films were funded by the offset, loans and private equity.

But virtually every film made in Australia since the offset's introduction has needed both strands of funding, with the result Screen Australia has virtually run out of cash. There have also been problems with the delay in paying rebates.

The Government is set to review the scheme early next year. Harley indicated at the Screen Producers Association conference that there were some signs a review could lead to a tightening of the scheme, which is now uncapped, rather than its extension. The industry will dearly hope she is wrong. Right now it is more offset it needs, not more upset.

IF YOU'RE a typical Australian cinemagoer, you might greet all this with: ''So what? Australian films are crap anyway.'' And even at the producers conference, there was much derisive talk of the Australian industry's preference for ''depressing films about junkies in Darlingurst''.

But not every Australian film can be dismissed so lightly. The six nominees for best film at the AFI awards in Melbourne on December 12 are all pretty serious-minded, but they are a diverse bunch: there's incest (Beautiful Kate), international politics (Balibo), Plasticine penfriends (Mary and Max), the bond between mothers and their children (Blessed), and the desire of a man to follow his dream and break free of an oppressive regime (Mao's Last Dancer). And the film that looks most depressing on paper, Samson & Delilah (a romance amid the squalor of a depressed Aboriginal community), is the one that has fared best in relative terms.

Yet there is no denying the fact Australian movies do not connect with Australian audiences. The dollars do not lie. But is that because the films are no good, or because they haven't been marketed and distributed properly?

One industry insider thinks it is more the latter than the former. ''Most of the time, filmmakers don't give a thought to how their films will be marketed. They're sold to a distributor, and then the marketing becomes the distributor's responsibility entirely. And when the film fails at the box office, the filmmaker throws their arms up and says, 'Hey, I did my job.' '' The answer, he says, is to ensure filmmakers start thinking about how their movies will be sold even before they have begun filming them. ''Most of the time, there aren't even decent production stills for the posters. That's just crazy.''

Screen Australia is increasingly of the same view. It now requires filmmakers to set aside a portion of their budget for marketing. The amount is identified in the funding application, and then ''quarantined'' so it can't disappear to cover some shortfall in film stock or catering or stars' salaries. It's a step in the right direction, but it won't get people along to films they don't want to see. Part of the reason audiences are so reluctant to take a punt on the home-grown stuff, Ruth Harley believes, is that most Australian movies don't have a clear enough sense of what they want to be.

She is determined to change that. Screen Australia will in the future fund films, she says, that show ''a precision in the minds of feature writers around genre''.

Want to make a romantic comedy-slash-horror film? Forget it. Make one or the other. ''It shouldn't be a little bit of this and a little bit of that,'' says Harley. ''It should be exactly what it's meant to be.''

That's a view backed by Antony Ginnane, a genre filmmaker from way back who has just made his first new feature in 20 years. ''Genre is key, and it's bizarre that when literally hundreds of social-realist Australian films fail, we keep making them; and when a few horror thrillers fail after Wolf Creek, it's time to shut that genre down again.''

Ginnane says it is obvious what sort of films we should be making. ''Mao's Last Dancer … like Australia, proves that melodrama, not social realism, is the genre our would-be screenwriters should be studying.'' He says Screen Australia should back ''two or three $100 million-return 'blue sky' shots per year'', rather than a larger slate of low-budget, low-return features that spread the risk but almost guarantee no upside.

Risky though it is, it is a strategy that seems to have some support from Harley, who has advocated the need for the agency to back films that can be put into wide release. ''We need more films that can be released on 150-plus screens, so more films aiming at that mainstream audience,'' she told The Australian Financial Review this month. Screen Australia had moved from putting ''small amounts of money in a very large amount of places'' towards putting ''larger amounts of money in the hands of a smaller number of producers and writers'', she said.

At the producers conference, Harley outlined her vision for the local industry five years from now. A bigger share of the box office. About 30 production houses, many self-sufficient or close to it, ''and some of them publicly listed''. Mainstream film exhibitors thanking their lucky stars the local industry was around to make them look good.

Given the situation today, it sounded awfully like the stuff of fantasy - a genre we haven't shown much interest in before.

-The AGE

The federal government has opened the door for regulation of local content on the internet after Minister for Broadband Stephen Conroy confirmed the government's intention to commence a review of convergent media regulation.

A day after ABC director of television Kim Dalton warned of the potential onslaught of cheap foreign content on IPTV through the national broadband network and suggested some of the proceeds of the federal government's "digital dividend" be used to fund production of Australian content, Senator Conroy told delegates at the Screen Producers Association of Australia Conference in Sydney that he accepted concerns about "the protection of Australian content in the multi-channel, multi-platform world".

"The creation of the NBN is a game changer for your industry," he said.

"In response to these changes, the government will need to consider the degree to which existing regulatory settings for audiovisual content, including those dealing with Australian programming, remain relevant."

Mr Dalton had reiterated his concerns that the NBN and launch of new IPTV and set-top providers posed a major threat to local content production, and some efforts, or at least thought, should be put to the issue.

He warned delegates at the SPAA conference that the NBN would unleash a plethora of IP content providers feeding unregulated and cheap international content into the Australian market.

He cited the introduction of the new free-to-air multi-channels as a pointer to the threat to local content, while describing their launch as "one of the stand-out success stories this year for the free-to-air platform".

"However, the impact of these channels on the creation of new local content has been minimal and, as far as the local production sector is concerned, there has been little to celebrate," he said.

Senator Conroy later responded to those concerns. "I can assure you that the government has no desire to see Australian cultural content swamped by a massive influx of cheap, overseas programming," he said.

"The challenge facing the government and, indeed, content creators and distributors, is how to ensure that quality Australian stories are widely available in the future."

Senator Conroy did not mention the terms or timetable for a review. While a review of content on convergent media is a strong indication the Rudd government will contemplate imposing local content standards on digital multi-channels and the internet, Senator Conroy was vague on intent, even contradictory, when he provided a caveat suggesting the government believes the market will do the job.

He acknowledged the lack of local content on new free-to-air multi-channels and excused it by noting the "rolling out a suite of new digital channels in four years is a technical and economic challenge" and is crucial for digital switchover.

"It is content that drives take-up, and new channels have to offer attractive programs," he said. "That's why I firmly believe that Australian audiences will demand Australian content on all the many, varied channels we will come to take for granted in a few short years."

Mr Dalton, who is also chief of the digital multi-channel marketing consortium Freeview, said ABC2, for instance, had no new funding. Consequently, he added, the only way the ABC had been able to fill its schedule had "been largely to run repeats of programs from ABC1 and by acquiring cheap foreign content".

He said there was 50 per cent less first-release Australian content on ABC2 as there was on ABC1.

- The Australian

The Australian film industry must act like a business and abandon social realism films for melodramas like Australia and Mao's Last Dancer, says Screen Producers Association of Australia (SPAA) president Antony I Ginnane.

Ginnane says governments should not be funding art for art's sake.

"We need to resolve once and for all the 40-year push/pull between art and commerce," Ginnane said at the opening of the SPAA conference in Sydney on Wednesday.

"Industry and government need to accept this is a business, not a culture fest.

"In the film industry, government intervention has been consistently used to assist in the creation of product the market does not want. And the market tells us that year in, year out by rejecting it en masse.

"We don't listen and we don't want the government to notice."

In 1998, Australian films took 18 per cent of the box office takings.

Since then the figure has not risen above 10 per cent. Most recently it has been floundering between 3 and 4 per cent.

Ginnane says the problem lies with the kind of films Australia is producing.

"Perhaps collectively our ability to read the marketplace and audience appetite has been so dulled by the subsidy drug that we've completely forgotten what audiences want," he said.

"Genre is key - and it's bizarre to me that when literally hundreds of social realist Australian films fail, we keep making them.

"And when a few horror thrillers fail after Wolf Creek it's time to shut that genre down again. That's very sad."

He says recent success stories were movies like Samson And Delilah, which was made with a minimal budget, and The Boys Are Back, which grossed $564,314 on its opening weekend.

These are examples of the kind of entertainment audiences have embraced, he says.

"Mao's Last Dancer, with a fantastic Australian gross of $13,975,651 to date, like Australia [the film], proved that melodrama not social realism is the genre our would-be screenwriters should be studying," he said.

Ginnane says with vision and investment Australia should have produced filmmakers like Luc Besson (The Fifth Element) and Peter Jackson (Lord Of The Rings).

"Now of course we have George Miller, and from a different perspective Baz Luhrmann. But apart from George and Baz, as an industry we could have achieved so much more," he said.

"And that would have happened without the straitjacket of cultural protectionism we enveloped ourselves in."

- ABC

A film studio in central western New South Wales is finalising a $1 million bid for federal stimulus funding.

The Lachlan River Studios in Cowra says it has the potential to become a regional film hub, because some Sydney companies are looking to move to the area.

The studio manager, Graham Patrick, says the funding bid will be submitted by the end of the month.

He says in the meantime, work on a 10-movie series for Chinese television will start early next year.

"They're looking to have five scripts approved and ready before they commence just so there is a flowthrough," he said.

"They're looking as I said to do 10 in total but they want to ... have five sort of organised because if they send people down obviously they want to keep them working, they don't want to have them sitting around here, so I expect early in the new year."

Mr Patrick says the project will provide a major injection into the local economy and is a good source of work for up to 100 local people.

"The 10 films are dramatised stories about the Chinese experience in Australia, so some are historical, some are contemporary, we've had three scripts that have now been finalised and a couple of others that are now in the process," he said.

- ABC

A new Screen Australia report has found the past year to be one of the local film and television industry's strongest.

The National Survey of Feature Film and TV Drama Production covers all Australian and co-production titles made each year, as well as foreign titles if they are shot or do post-production work in Australia.

In 2008/09 the production slate included 38 features and 653 hours of television drama with a total value of $688 million.

The 29 Australian features had total budgets of $365 million - the highest result in 20 years and well above the five-year average of $177 million.

Screen Australia CEO Ruth Harley admits the figures were boosted by animated features Happy Feet 2 and Guardians Of Ga'Hoole.

"It's true that Happy Feet and Guardians Of Ga'Hoole do make a very substantial contribution," she said.

"But I think, rather than just look at them as anomalies, we ought to see the underlying strength that they represent - which is Australian-generated films of this scale aren't subject to the exchange rate vagaries, so I see that as a very positive trend and one that is sustainable."

However, there was a significant drop in foreign production in 2008/09 - with just $22 million spent in Australia, compared to $251 million the previous year.

It was also the first year since the survey began in 1988 that no US feature production took place in Australia.

-ABC

The latest Scott Hicks movie has been made in the director's own backyard.

South Australian scenery holds centre stage in The Boys Are Back and the movie, headlined by British star Clive Owen, has had its world premiere in Adelaide.

Owen and the picturesque Fleurieu Peninsula just to the south of Adelaide share the limelight.

Hicks has used the wine region of McLaren Vale and the Aldinga coastline as backdrops and the tourist industry hopes it will spark both national and international interest in the area.

"Already overseas in Toronto and London and parts of America I've found that people are intrigued and wanting to know where this is, so let's see what happens, it would be nice," says Hicks, who has his own vineyard in the Adelaide region.

Australian actor Erik Thomson is appearing in his first Hicks movie.

He lives just minutes from where the film was shot and can see the tourism potential.

"There was genuine interest in the area ... it's not made up, it looks beautiful and I think, if the film is successful internationally, people will certainly want to come down here," he said.

Visitor boost

The South Australian Film Corporation pumped in nearly $1 million into the production to ensure it was shot in SA rather than Queensland.

Tourism Commission boss, Andrew McEvoy, is hoping the film will boost visitor numbers as it recovers from a depressed world market .

"A film like this will help, it won't be the panacea but it'll wake a lot of people to some of the most beautiful parts of our state," he said.

The story of a man suddenly having to raise his children alone is already winning praise from film critics.

Much of the credit for that goes to Hicks and Owen, but six-year-old Sydneysider Nicholas McAnulty is also winning praise after auditioning as an unknown.

"Nicholas walked into the room one day and I thought 'I think he's it', you know, and he turned out to be an absolute gem," Hicks said.

The Boys Are Back will have its Australian cinema release in the second week of November.

-ABC

An Australian-made documentary film about soldiers in East Timor has won an award in a major US film festival.

Timor Tour Of Duty, which looks at the Indonesian military's secret war against Australian and New Zealand troops and international peacekeepers in East Timor, received a special commendation Platinum Reel Award from the 2009 Nevada Film Festival.

The film made its US and international screen debut at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival on Sunday.

Timor Tour Of Duty is a film is about two Australian soldiers and their involvement in a shootout in East Timor about a year after the death of New Zealand soldier Private Leonard Manning.

Manning, 24, was the United Nations' first combat fatality in Timor.

He was shot in an ambush on July 24, 2000, during a security sweep in a rugged border region.

He was killed by militia gunfire but his body was later found mutilated.

Scott Sherwin, serving with Australia's Alpha Company, reveals in the documentary film that during a shootout with the pro-Indonesian militia in 2001 near Balibo, Manning's fate kept racing through his mind.

"I knew in the back of my mind that if we were captured then we would be cut up and killed, so choices were quite limited," he said.

"We had to fight back to stay alive."

The film's director and producer, Sasha Uzunov, believes that former US president Bill Clinton should have been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in East Timor.

"In my film, Timor Tour Of Duty, I reveal that the United States was the good guy in averting genocide in the tiny south east Asian land of East Timor," he said.

"Al Gore and Barack Obama have a Nobel Peace Prize but Clinton should have one as well.

"The kudos for East Timor belongs to Clinton, not ex-Australian prime minister John Howard and his then-foreign minister Alexander Downer."

Uzunov also said that Sherwin's patrol commander should have received a bravery award.

"I also take this opportunity to thank the two ex-soldiers ... for telling me their story about the shoot out in East Timor," he said.

"It is a pity that their patrol commander Kevin Campbell has missed out on an Australian bravery medal because of politics."

- ABC

The big budget Bollywood remake of US film Step Mom set to be shot in Sydney.

It will be first Bollywood film to be shot entirely in the city and will feature a number of big name Indian stars, including director and TV personality Karan Johar.

"We are excited to showcase the very best that Australia has to offer," Johar, principal of the film's production company, Dharma Productions, said in a statement.

"We hope to bring back some of the infectious spirit and charm that has been synonymous with Australia and Australians."

The exact locations for the film cannot be revealed for security reasons but the Harbour Bridge and Darling Harbour will feature.

The NSW Government's Virginia Judge says the film will create 200 jobs for cast and crew.

"This movie will take Sydney to Bollywood and an audience of more than 1 billion people," she said.

The film could not have come at a better time, with relations between India and Australia taking a battering over the past few months after a number of attacks on Indian students.

- ABC

Comic book movie The Green Lantern will no longer be shot in Australia, due to the strength of the dollar.

The big-budget adaptation was due to start filming in Sydney in November, but Warner Bros is now looking at locations in the US and Canada after the Australian dollar shot to more than $US0.92.

The dollar is tipped to reach parity or more in the coming weeks - meaning a blow-out in costs for the filmmakers.

"After working closely with our partners at the NSW Film and Television Office and examining every scenario, we have decided to move the production of Green Lantern," Warner Bros said in a statement through Screen NSW.

"The decision is a reflection of the current global economic situation, including fluctuations in currency valuation and overall costs."

The Green Lantern is due to be released in 2011.

It stars Ryan Reynolds in the title role and is to be directed by Martin Campbell.

The production was expected to create about 500 jobs in New South Wales, which secured the film over Victoria and Queensland.

Warner Bros has shot films such as the Matrix trilogy and Superman Returns in Sydney in the past.

- ABC

THE notion that Australians dislike Australian films is a myth, according to a research study commissioned by Film Finance Commission Australia.

EVEN in an Australian industry that outperforms globally, our cinematographers are the high achievers of our film sector.

The lower house of the New South Wales Parliament has passed laws aimed at boosting the film industry in the state.