Jenny Neighbour, long-running Head of Programs and Documentary Programmer at the Sydney Film Festival, pays tribute to David Stratton, who died on 14 August 2025, aged 85.
Since early childhood, David Stratton AM was obsessed with cinema, meticulously reviewing everything he saw, and from age 19, running a film society in his hometown of Trowbridge, Wiltshire, UK. Arriving in Sydney in 1963, he went along to a WEA Film Study Group where he met members of the Sydney Film Festival (SFF) committee, and subsequently signed up as an usher, receiving a free ticket in return. Soon after, he was invited to join the film subcommittee and later the festival board. He told his father he would return to work in the family grocery store, and had just booked his passage home when the former SFF director Ian Klava announced his resignation, and Stratton immediately decided to apply. In late 1965, Stratton was appointed to his 'dream job', Director of the SFF at age 26.
In the days before streaming, DVDs or videos, no one involved in the festival was able to preview the films; rather, the committee trawled publications like Sight & Sound for information on compelling new titles to invite. Stratton became the first SFF director to travel overseas, enabling him to forge relationships with filmmakers, festivals, distributors and sales agents and secure films and guests annually for SFF.
Excerpt from David Stratton: A Cinematic Life (Sally Aitken, 2017). NFSA title: 1496237
Stratton strongly believed that the festival had to invite filmmaker guests, but funds were limited. In 1967, the US director Josef von Sternberg and Finnish filmmaker Jörn Donner attended SFF. From that year on, money was allocated to guests and Stratton with his overseas connections managed to organise visits from, among others, Satyajit Ray, Jerzy Skolimowski, Michelangelo Antonioni, Rouben Mamoulian, Jamie Lee Curtis and Warren Beatty.
The 14th SFF in June 1967, Stratton’s second as director, took place at the University of Sydney, the Wintergarden in Rose Bay and the Cremorne Orpheum. Stratton proposed moving the entire event to Rose Bay, where it remained until 1973, when he negotiated with David Williams, then managing director of Greater Union, for the festival to screen at the State Theatre – still its beloved home today.
In the 1960s, films were regularly cut or banned by the Chief Censor, whether in the festival or on the distribution circuit. Stratton viewed censorship as 'evil, really evil'. He’d assumed that the festival would not be subject to censorship, as was the case with film societies back in England. He was flabbergasted when hearing that festival films were censored and, even before taking up the directorship, had lobbied the festival committee to start a campaign against it. At the time, details of films cut or banned weren’t made public, and festivals and distributors submissively toed the line. The committee agreed to protest publicly against censorship, and to campaign for the introduction of a restricted, or R, certificate and to release details of any cuts ordered by the censors, thus ending the secrecy.
When the censor made cuts to Hugs and Kisses (Jonas Cornell, 1967), Stratton decided that footage with the word ‘censored’ should be inserted wherever the film had been cut. In 1969, the Chief Censor banned I Love, You Love, as the film’s director Stig Björkman was on his way to Australia for the festival. Stratton sent Björkman a telegram in Singapore telling him that his film had been banned: 'but please come, and let’s make a hell of a fuss about it'. The press lapped up the Swedish filmmaker’s outrage, and hundreds of festival patrons signed a petition, printed in The Australian newspaper, calling for an end to censorship.
The fight continued until in 1975 a gentleman’s agreement – nothing in law – was reached with the Attorney-General, allowing the festival to screen films a limited number of times, over a brief period, as long as they hadn’t already been rejected by the censors. And finally, in 1983, the newly elected Hawke Government made that agreement law. The announcement was made just before Stratton’s last festival: 'I felt 18 years as director was long enough. I was depressed at the resurgence of censorship ... It wasn’t a fight I wanted to continue fighting for the rest of my life, and I wanted to give my personal relationship a chance without the lengthy absences abroad that the job entailed.'
Alex Sloan in conversation with David Stratton at the NFSA in 2022.
Sadly, Australian filmmaking in Stratton’s early SFF years wasn’t always well received. 'We showed Tim Burstall’s Two Thousand Weeks in 1969. It was just about the only Australian feature at the time. I thought it had flaws, but was worth supporting... Unfortunately the screening was close to being a disaster. The audience started snickering at the film, and about halfway through [lead actor] Jeanie Drynan burst into tears and ran out.' George Miller recalled, 'No one who was there at that screening can forget it. This was the first genuine Australian film, Australian budgeted and Australian shot, for many years, and the audience started to titter at some of the more purple passages of narration. I remember someone connected with the film stood up and yelled, "Give it a go, you apes".'
Nonetheless, during his long tenure at the festival and later career, Stratton championed Australian filmmaking – Phillip Adams commented he was 'a warrior in the cause of finding an audience for Australian films' and Jack Thompson said 'David brought home to us as Australian filmmakers that we’re doing something that’s worth recording'.
In 1974, the SFF Australian premiere of Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris, one of the first significant films of the New Wave, received a warm response, and it was decided to host a Salute to Australian Film the following year to draw attention to and celebrate the Australian film industry. The 1975 festival opened with Ken Hannam’s Sunday Too Far Away – with one of Australia’s top shearers on a truck outside the State Theatre shearing sheep – a special booklet listing every feature film ever made in Australia was published, and 25 retrospective titles were screened.
In 1970, Stratton and the board introduced a short film competition to encourage Australian filmmaking. Renowned local film practitioners, in front of and behind the camera, have premiered their work in the festival’s short film awards over five decades, including Phil Noyce (Castor and Pollux, 1974); Gillian Armstrong (The Singer and the Dancer, 1976); Paul Cox (We Are All Alone My Dear, 1977); Jane Campion (A Girl’s Own Story, 1984); Rolf de Heer (Tread Softly..., 1984); Sue Brooks (The Drover's Wife, 1985); Alex Proyas (After Hours, 1985); David Caesar (Shoppingtown, 1987); Rowan Woods (Kenny’s Love, 1987); Samantha Lang (Audacious, 1995) and Ivan Sen (Wind, 2000).
In 1972 George Miller and Byron Kennedy entered their short film, Violence in the Cinema Part 1, in the short film awards in the fiction section, but it was not selected as a finalist because the judges thought it was in the wrong category. According to Miller, 'David Stratton, God bless him, looked at the film himself and put it in the main festival. Had that not happened, it would not have been taken up by Greater Union and released commercially. It was the thing that triggered us into doing a feature, which ultimately was Mad Max. It was a direct sequence of events.'
Stratton authored several books focusing on cinema, particularly Australian cinema: The Last New Wave (1980), The Avocado Plantation (1990), I Peed on Fellini (autobiography, 2008), 101 Marvellous Movies You May Have Missed (2018), My Favourite Movies (2021) and most recently, Australia at the Movies (2024).
David Stratton in conversation with Meg Labrum at the NFSA, 2019
Stratton and SFF President Ross Tzannes started the Travelling Film Festival in 1974, with the intention of taking the best of the Sydney Film Festival to the country, sparked by a Phillip Adams comment, 'You’ve got such a marvellous thing going for you, why don’t you show it to all Australians?'. At first, it only went to six centres – Armidale, Lismore, Bowral, Wagga Wagga, Orange and Albury – with a mixed bag of films including Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris, introduced in Bowral by director Peter Weir. Still on the road today, over the decades the Travelling Film Festival has been to every state (except WA) and both territories, screening Australian and international films to loyal, enthusiastic audiences.
Stratton wrote for the screen industry publication Variety (1983–2023), his first paid review being Mad Max 2 (aka The Road Warrior), and reviewed films for The Australian from 1990 to 2003. He also contributed articles to The Age, The Bulletin, The Sydney Morning Herald, Cinema Papers and International Film Guide (UK). Stratton became a familiar figure on the festival circuit, instantly identifiable and highly regarded, serving on the jury for the Venice, Berlin, Montreal, Karlovy Vary, Hawaii and Adelaide film festivals. He was president of the FIPRESCI (International Film Critics) juries in Cannes and Venice.
He had worked as a feature film consultant and host for SBS, starting in 1981, the year after it commenced broadcasting. In 1986, The Movie Show was launched on SBS, and Stratton and co-host Margaret Pomeranz’s reviews of the latest movies became a must-see for film fans Australia-wide. In addition to reviewing new releases, The Movie Show covered the making of dozens of Australian films, with Stratton and Pomeranz interviewing then-unknown filmmakers such as Baz Luhrmann and Stephan Elliot during production of their first features. As co-presenter of The Movie Show, Stratton attended Cannes, Berlin, Venice and many other international film festivals where he interviewed hundreds of international filmmakers. The high esteem in which Stratton, Pomeranz and The Movie Show were held was instrumental in it securing access to many of the world’s leading filmmakers when television outlets with far greater audience numbers were denied.
David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz: excerpt from David Stratton: A Cinematic Life (Sally Aitken, 2017). NFSA title: 1496237
It is true to say that in the community involved in the world’s most important film festivals, and in the world of international cinema in general, Stratton was regarded as one of its most knowledgeable and respected figures. As deep as his knowledge ran, and as consuming as his passion for cinema was, Stratton was anything but a film elitist. He was equally at home interviewing the world’s greatest filmmakers and the unknown director making their first nervous appearance on the festival circuit (like a certain Quentin Tarantino, whose first-ever film festival TV interview was with Stratton). Similarly, he was equally at ease watching the great masterpieces of world cinema and the 'guilty pleasures' of the B-movies he loved.
'Margaret and David' moved to the ABC with At The Movies in 2004, which ran for 10 years until they retired at the end of 2014. The community’s affection for Stratton and Pomeranz continued long after David and Margaret decided to call time on their 28-year television partnership. The much-loved duo shaped the way Australians saw cinema and talked about it. The Travelling Film Festival audience in Wagga Wagga still talks about their visit, and their presentation at the 2015 SFF ('The Films We Love') sold out quickly, and the outpouring of affection and respect was palpable.
From 1988 to 2023, Stratton proudly presented a series of lectures on film history at Sydney University’s Centre for Continuing Education, steadfastly moving through each decade of cinema to the delight of his enthusiastic audience. He was a recipient of the Longford Award and the Chauvel Award, a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters (France) and became a Member of the Order of Australia in 2015. He was also the subject of the 2017 documentary David Stratton: A Cinematic Life, directed by Sally Aitken.
Stratton continued his connection with SFF, a familiar figure at the front of the State Theatre stalls. He also maintained his lifelong passion for sharing his love of cinema, presenting a Top Ten at SFF focusing on key directors (Bergman, Scorsese, Kurosawa, Kaurismäki) and in 2019 programming 10 trailblazing films by Essential Australian Women Directors, from NFSA Restores: The Cheaters (Paulette McDonagh, 1929) to The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2013).
In 2024, Stratton attended the Sydney Film Festival premiere screening of the NFSA restoration of The Cars That Ate Paris. He was delighted to see the film back at the festival. Indeed, Stratton’s charm was that, despite his profile and immense knowledge of cinematic history and its creators, he was always one of us – a film lover taking his seat in the cinema ready for the opening scene.
Jenny Neighbour is the former Head of Programs and Documentary Programmer at the Sydney Film Festival. All quotations are taken from The Oral History of the Sydney Film Festival (1993) unless otherwise noted.
When announcing his death on 14 August 2025, David Stratton’s family issued a statement, which read in part: ‘David's passion for film, commitment to Australian cinema, and generous spirit touched countless lives ... [We] invite everyone to celebrate David's remarkable life and legacy by watching their favourite movie, or David's favourite movie of all time – Singin' in the Rain.’
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Main image: David Stratton: A Cinematic Life (Sally Aitken, 2017). NFSA title: 1496237
Listen to David Stratton in conversation at the NFSA with Alex Sloan about his book, My Favourite Movies, in February 2022.
We bring you a recording of our conversation with David Stratton when he visited the NFSA in Canberra in 2019 to discuss the release of his book, 101 Marvellous Movies You May Have Missed.
NFSA Restores is an exciting program that digitises, restores and preserves Australian films so they can be seen in today’s digital cinemas.
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia acknowledges Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work and live and gives respect to their Elders both past and present.
