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Oz fest in the desert: Palm Springs honors Down Under indies

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Australia has produced some great indie flicks (‘Chopper,’ ‘The Proposition,’ just to name a couple), but it rarely gets its due as a hotbed for cinema. With that in mind, organizers of this year’s annual Palm Springs International Film Festival -- which launched Tuesday evening in the desert with a lavish awards gala -- have decided to go Down Under with a new program that will spotlight the region’s emerging talent.

This Saturday, the festival will screen nine new films from the country during a daylong event entitled “G’Day USA: A Showcase of New Australian Cinema.”

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The idea for the showcase originated shortly after the Cannes Film Festival, when the Palm Springs festival programmers gathered to discuss which buzz-worthy films were emerging from various countries.

“There was a pattern developing, and when we looked further into it we discovered there was a really great showing from Australia,” said Helen du Toit, the festival’s director of programming. “We ended up turning away more films than we could have imagined.”

At least one participant from each of the featured films will attend the festival, with Anthony LaPaglia and Rachel Ward among them. That’s partly thanks to sponsorship of the Australian Consulate General in Los Angeles and Tourism Australia, whose G’Day USA program was recently launched to help promote the country and some of its industries, including film.

Ward will promote her directorial debut, “Beautiful Kate,” a film starring Rachel Griffiths and Bryan Brown about a self-loathing writer who returns home to the Australian outback to try to figure out the roots of his family’s dysfunction. “She crosses over and it’s just a very assured directorial debut that’s gorgeously shot, and the performances are absolutely spot on,” Du Toit said of the film.

The day will kick off with the gala screening and U.S. premiere of “My Year Without Sex,” Sarah Watt’s tale of a woman struggling to recover after battling a near-fatal illness. ‘Samson and Delilah,’ the love story about two Aboriginal teens that won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, will also be screened.

“Having been involved in the festival back in the days of the first Australian new wave, it’s just really exciting to see a new surge of talent coming out of the country showing that same kind of vibrancy,” said festival director Darryl Macdonald. “To see indigenous cinemas resurrect and reinvent themselves is always really gratifying.”

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-- Amy Kaufman

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