
When
Wed 9 Jul 2025
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Dirk de Bruyn (1950–) has been one of the most adventurous, consistent, underrated and productive filmmakers working in Australia over the last 50 years. He has also been a significant figure in Melbourne screen culture working as a curator, writer, administrator and teacher. He was the president and a founding member of the Modern Image Makers Association, an active member of the Melbourne Super 8 Film Group and an associate professor teaching animation and digital culture at Deakin University, writing extensively on experimental cinema of various kinds.
His often-experimental work blurs the boundaries between fiction, documentary, animation, found footage, materialist, structuralist, personal, performative, political and culturally sensitive filmmaking. Following some of the leads of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage in the 1960s, in his exploration of closed-eye vision, subjectivity and trance-like states, De Bruyn’s restless cinema fuses personal concerns with broader questions of film form and (multi)cultural history.
This program cherrypicks four films from De Bruyn’s agitated and large body of work across Super 8, 16mm, 35mm and various formats of digital video. It includes two features which explore daily life and the connections it makes with deeper histories, emotions and relationships: the widely celebrated Homecomings (1987) and the more recent timelapse opus, Telescope (2012). De Bruyn continues to produce new, challenging work and his practice over the last ten years is represented by two evocative shorts: Re-Vue (2017) and Flinders (2024).
Although the Cinémathèque has screened a number of De Bruyn’s films over the last 40 years, we are proud to present this first retrospective program.
About Melbourne Cinémathèque
Australia's longest-running film society, Melbourne Cinémathèque screens significant works of international cinema in the medium they were created, the way they would have originally screened.
Melbourne Cinémathèque is self-administered, volunteer-run, not-for-profit and membership-driven.
