This year, I had the privilege of hosting the premiere of the Multicultural Film Festival, an extraordinary invitation, and one I was quite overwhelmed to receive. During my time as Chairperson of the Victorian Multicultural Commission, this festival was one of the things I was proudest of. It began as a modest initiative: a summer pilot that paired Swinburne film students with aspiring filmmakers from culturally and linguistically diverse communities, built on a hunch that talent is everywhere and access is not and that if you put a camera in creative hands, the stories will find their way out.
Eight festivals later, that hunch has grown into something I could not have predicted. This year, 767 films were submitted from around the world. Ten made the Official Selection. The distance between a summer pilot and a global field of 767 is not measured in budgets or grants. It is measured in people who decided their story was worth telling.
The premiere fell during Refugee Week, whose theme “A Million Stories” could not have been more fitting. It is a deceptively gentle phrase. A million stories. It sounds like abundance, and it is. But it is also a quiet rebuke to the way we usually talk about people who have had to leave home. In the news cycle, a refugee is a number, a boat, a border, a line in a budget, a problem to be managed. I spent much of my early career in courtrooms and crime rounds, and I learned there how easily a human being can be reduced to a single fact about the worst or hardest day of their life. A story well told does the opposite. It doesn’t ask permission; it arrives, and we make room. It refuses the single fact. It insists on the whole person.
That insistence was everywhere. From No Voice to Big Voice, which took out the Chairperson’s Refugee Stories Award, is exactly what its title promises. The journey from being spoken about to speaking for yourself. Maksym & Milana, a Ukrainian story made by filmmakers now based in Spain, reminded us that displacement scatters people across continents but does not sever them from where they came from; we sent our congratulations across the globe because the makers could not be in the room. Hui Jia going home won Best Victorian Short Non-Fiction, and there is something almost unbearably tender about a film named for a place you can no longer simply return to. These are not issues. They are not policy positions. They are people, rendered with such specificity that you forget, for ninety seconds in the dark, that you ever thought of them as a category.
We also paused to remember one of our own. Dr Atalanti Dionysus, an extraordinary interdisciplinary filmmaker who gave so much to this festival, passed away earlier this year. We held a minute’s silence in her honour. I have learned that silence in a crowded room is its own kind of storytelling — a story told entirely in what is not said. Atalanti spent her life making the unseen visible. It felt right that a festival built on exactly that should stop, even for sixty seconds, and let her absence be felt. Stories, it turns out, outlive the people who tell them. That is rather the point of telling them.
I think we need this more than we admit. We are living through a moment when difference is too often treated as a threat to be contained rather than a richness to be celebrated, when the language around migration has hardened, when it has become strangely respectable to be incurious about your neighbour. A film festival cannot fix any of that. But it can do something stubborn and necessary: it can put you in a dark room with a stranger’s life and dare you to remain unmoved. Most of us cannot. That failure to remain unmoved is called empathy, and it is the most undervalued civic resource we have.
What moved me most was not any single film but the room itself. Wurundjeri Country honoured at the start of the night, the oldest continuous storytelling culture on earth holding the door open for the newest arrivals; Ajak Kwai opening the evening in Arabic, Sudanese and English; an Assyrian dance group; Ukrainian grief; Chinese longing; a Vietnamese museum director and an Islamophobia envoy and a fire commissioner and a clutch of nervous young filmmakers all watching the same screen. That is not a slogan about multiculturalism. That is the thing itself, in a single room, in Melbourne.
The good news is that you don’t have to take my word for it. MFF On Tour will bring the full program to venues across Victoria from July to November, before streaming on SBS On Demand. Go. Take someone who thinks they already know the story. Watch them discover they only knew one of a million.
That is what storytelling has always done. It is how we connect, how we share, how we come to understand one another. I have spent a career believing that, and standing in that cinema, in a room that held a million stories, it resonated more powerfully than ever.