ORGANISER: Well, I thought it was a very worthwhile film. VICKI KERRIGAN: Why was it important to you to screen the film? I don't especially want to send people into a flurry about it's available for everybody, because it was fairly difficult to find, but yeah, that was the way we had to import it because it's illegal to import it into this country and it could have been confiscated at customs. Triple J reporter Vicki Kerrigan was there, and spoke to one of the organisers. PETA DONALD: Ken Park has already been screened in a cold Melbourne warehouse on Tuesday night to a select audience of 40, who received invitations by email. New South Wales' police are aware of tonight's event, and their minister says they'll enforce the law. PETA DONALD: It's the job of state police to enforce the federal laws on film classification. Yeah, I suppose so, I'm putting something on the line here, and if that involves being arrested for this, yeah I'm prepared to do it. MARGARET POMERANZ: Prepared? I mean, this is sort of like such a strange question. PETA DONALD: Are you prepared to be arrested? Whether that eventuates may not be in our hands, but we are planning to screen it so that a few more adults in this country than 10 can have a debate about the merits of the film and whether the system is letting us down. MARGARET POMERANZ: We are planning to screen the film. Under which the film Ken Park, by the provocative New York director Larry Clark, was refused classification, because of its prolonged scenes of actual sex.Ī group calling itself Free Cinema has publicised the fact that it has a copy of the film, and tonight it plans to show it at a town hall in Sydney.įilm Critic Margaret Pomeranz, is a member of the group. PETA DONALD: It's a deliberate challenge to Australia's film censorship laws. The law says individuals who show a film like Ken Park that's been refused classification can face an $11,000 fine or up to one year in jail. NSW police are standing by in Balmain, where a group called Free Cinema plans to screen the film at a public meeting this evening. In Sydney, the film is the controversial Ken Park, already banned federally, but apparently about to be shown in Sydney. The Victorian case is going to the courts, and we'll hear shortly that the issue there is whether to gag people who tell lies about Hitler's mass extermination of the Jews. MARK COLVIN: Two films are testing the limits of free speech in Australia tonight – one in Sydney, one in Melbourne, one controversial because of sex, the other because of race.

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