Melbourne Women in Film Festival: Navigating precarity in building a sustainable professional festival

As the Melbourne Women in Film Festival (mwff.org.au) reaches its ninth year,[1] we have achieved the position of Australia’s longest running women’s film festival currently in operation.[2] From a two-day festival of retrospective screenings and experimental shorts held in 2017, the festival has grown to an annual five-day event that showcases films by Australian, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Pasifika women and gender diverse creatives. Across five days each March, MWFF presents an expanding program of short and feature film screenings, a short film competition including awards for best student and best short film, a critics lab,[3] retrospective screenings, an education program for high school students, and a series of networking events and workshops for emerging and mid-career filmmakers.

Alongside a growing reputation and expanding size, over its near-decade-long operation MWFF has also professionalised significantly. The first MWFF was supported by a crowdfunding campaign and sponsorship from a small number of education and beverage partners. As festival director Sian Mitchell reflected in late 2024:

Looking back on that festival now, and also some of the things that we did around that just to try to raise money, like the crowdfunding video, it seems to me now like it was like a school project. I don’t want to denigrate what we did, because I thought we did a really great job, […] but just compared to where we are at now.

In its first year MWFF was organised by a four-person operations team (the authors of this article), guided by a six-person board of directors, and supported by an art director and team of 18 front-of-house volunteers. It is important to note that the festival’s early governance structure was not typical for an event of its size. The presence of a board of directors from the festival’s first event is unusual compared to many other volunteer-run festivals in Australia, which typically acquire such a governance structure only once they are more established.[4] 

Fig. 1: Melbourne Women in Film Festival opening night 2025, featuring members of the festival programming and operations team on stage at ACMI, Melbourne. Source: Melbourne Women in Film Festival.

In 2025 the festival is a far more established organisation. While the event maintains the same governance structure, with a board of nine directors, core organising team of four – director, deputy director, and two festival coordinators – and an ongoing art director, the festival has also expanded significantly. We have grown our programming team to include seven additional members, as well as adding an education manager, guest services coordinator, partnerships coordinator, operations manager, and social media team, along with a growing number of front-of-house volunteers and interns who join us each festival. MWFF is now supported by a multi-year arts grant from the City of Melbourne as well as an annual event grant from the state government agency VicScreen. Since 2023 it has also held a formal multi-year venue partnership with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Australia’s national museum of screen culture and the city’s premiere film festival screening venue.

Yet despite the many significant advances that the festival has made, we remain entirely volunteer run. As the festival has grown and secured sources of funding and institutional partnerships that serve to embed the festival in the local cultural events and screen industry scenes, the underlying precarity of the organisation has remained largely unchanged. Like many arts organisations in Australia, our government funding partners support project-based funding and the payment of artist fees, but these grants preclude spending on core operational costs including staff salaries.[5] This aligns with a push for arts organisations in Australia and globally to diversify their funding sources,[6] with philanthropy and ticket sales expected to bolster government funding to cover operational needs. 

Yet these other sources of funding produce their own challenges for small to medium arts organisations. MWFF has strong ticket sales each year, which along with unspent funds enable the festival to cover administrative costs for insurance, accountancy fees, and compliance costs, but are insufficient to cover wage and related payroll and human resources costs required to employ staff. While private giving and philanthropic funding are desirable sources for the festival to develop, in a competitive fundraising environment developing this income stream would require a time-intensive whole-of-festival approach with a dedicated philanthropic or fundraising manager, a role which has itself professionalised and is thus difficult to fill in a volunteer capacity.[7] Employed staff also represent an increased liability and risk as a committed expense for the organisation, with the potential for this to produce conflicting agendas in running the festival as efforts are required to both cover base costs as well as achieve festival objectives. In this context we have struggled to establish paid roles for festival staff, and with it a clear plan for succession for when the festival’s founding members leave. 

The challenges that face MWFF are not unique; they reflect similar issues of precarity that face many festivals, both film and otherwise, worldwide.[8] Writing in 2011, Skadi Loist highlighted the precarious nature of festival labour and its implications for organisational stability and longevity. In speaking to the neoliberal turn in funding politics, Loist emphasised how a need for funding places pressure on festivals to professionalise, which in turn places demands on festival workers to do the same. Despite a growing expectation of professionalised labour, however, remuneration for festival employees rarely keeps pace, making worker retention and recruitment a challenge for small organisations. As Loist observed, ‘Whenever a member of the volunteer festival team leaves it disrupts the fragile mechanism of the festival organization, and it becomes more difficult to find suitable new candidates.’[9] Yet, as she also notes, the consuming nature of the ‘all-the-time’ work involved in running festivals means ‘it is not surprising that festival workers can only do this job for a certain amount of time.’[10]

While Loist’s work reflects primarily on the underpayment of festival organisers in insecure funding environments, the labour issues identified are compounded when festival teams are entirely volunteer run. Even so, existing research has not explored such cases with any consistency or depth. Although a growing body of literature explores the importance of volunteers within festival organisations,[11] such research has largely focused on the management and retention of volunteers, their experiences, motivations, and the legacies volunteering generate for both individuals and organisations.[12] Likewise, examinations of festival organisations typically focus on case studies, exploring their organisational structure as not-for-profits, commercial, municipal, or foundation-based operations, but offering minimal information about their labour practices beyond whether their organisers are waged or gift their time to the event.[13] 

Indeed, volunteers and festival organisers are often considered as separate categories of festival workers, even when both groups work without remuneration for their contributions.[14] With case studies largely offering a static snapshot of the waged/unwaged status of festival organising teams, little attention to date has been devoted to analysing the struggles that many festivals navigate as they evolve along the continuum between these states. While not making a claim to intervene entirely in this space, though certainly more research is needed, this short article hopes to offer a small glimpse into this issue as seen from the perspective of festival organisers who also happen to be film and festival scholars.

Taking stock: MWFF in conversation

In December 2024 the authors, as founding festival organisers, gathered to discuss the state of MWFF. Reflecting on the festival’s first event and how much it has grown, we considered what future MWFF might have as a volunteer-run, academic-led, community-oriented festival in the context of an increasingly professionalised and complex cultural industries environment. Key observations emerged from our discussion: an acute awareness of how precarity – of the festival as an organisation and as an element of festival labour – presents a barrier to recruitment; and the extent to which the festival’s function in community-building remains core to our mission. 

For added context, it is worth noting that the founding organisers of this festival, as well as several of the other volunteer organisers, programmers, and board members who have contributed over the festival’s years of operation, are academics. Many, including three of the founders, were precariously employed as casual tutors when they started with the festival. Others are current doctoral students. The alignment between the academy and the festival has shaped this event, with scholarly perspectives informing approaches to programming, and the festival routinely incorporates research interests in the design of panels and other activities.[15] We have also ensured that internships and learning opportunities have become a mainstay of the festival’s operation. This tie to the academy has also helped financially by providing access to funding from university partners. Finally, as noted below, it has also allowed the festival to run in a fully volunteer capacity while the core organisers benefit both personally and professionally – through meeting university public engagement objectives – from their involvement in the festival.

All of this shapes how we think about the challenges of precarity and the future of this festival. The remainder of this article is an edited transcript of some of the salient points from our conversation.

Fig. 2: Closing night of Melbourne Women in Film Festival 2025. Filmmakers Q&A panel for the Nightmares and Daydreams short film program at ACMI, Melbourne. Source: Melbourne Women in Film Festival.

What has it meant for MWFF that the core organising team are all academics?

Whitney Monaghan: I mean, a couple of things stand out to me. And one is that when you get four academics trying to come up with a theme for the festival, it takes some extra time to connect that to your audience.

Janice Loreck: I think it’s also important to observe that we were all at a certain point in our careers as academics [when the festival started]. Most of us were relatively junior, some of us only a couple of years out from our PhD, and we were looking for an engagement project to undertake that fit with our research interests. I think that was also a motivation, in addition to our own individual enthusiasm for supporting women and gender diverse people’s filmmaking, which, of course, at the time was supported by the findings of the Gender Matters report,[16] which had come out only a couple of years earlier. But I think our desire to actualise our scholarly research was really significant in why we set up the festival and is still a motivating factor.

Monaghan: At the time when we first came together to start things, it was that CV building, but it’s also a source of collaboration. […] The festival enables this ongoing collaboration that we have as a team. And so I think that within our core four, we in our academic jobs all have some element of industry engagement that’s expected of us, and so the festival fulfills that role, and also fulfills the need to continually think together and work together. […] Probably in my academic career, I would consider the work that we do together as one of my longest and most fulfilling collaborations. And that involves the writing, but also just the thinking together and the programming and the legacy that we leave in our online archive as a trace of that collaboration over many years.

Loreck: It also means a lot to me that we’re doing something for the community, our community. We can do that within the context of our academic roles as teachers, but I also feel very connected to the community of Melbourne, of Australia, of our region, and it feels really good to do work for that community.

Monaghan: And still every festival, I think, why am I still doing this?

Sian Mitchell: Every festival, I do the same thing. And then it gets to the festival, and you go, this is amazing! And then you read the really positive feedback, and it’s like, ‘thank you so much for doing this for the community’. And then I think to myself, well, I can’t leave. So if we’re thinking about legacy and motivation, for me the motivation is the community. 

Kirsten Stevens: I feel like the community is an extension of the collaborative spirit that we’ve all brought to the festival. […] that’s what we’ve built up, and I think that’s also a really hard thing to replace, to find someone who can step in. I think there are lots of people who like being part of that community, but it does become a unique responsibility to be the people responsible for calling that community together every year.

Is there a realistic future for an entirely volunteer-run MWFF?

Mitchell: I don’t think so. Because I think we’ve done too good a job at building it to be a part of a very specific festival landscape in Melbourne. I also think about the time that we’re in now, 2024, and the broader discourses around creative industries and labour and the exploitation of underrepresented people in general. I think that, plus us passing as very professional in a lot of ways, and our growth means that I don’t think the festival can get away much longer with not having paid roles at its size and trajectory. 

Monaghan: I think as the festival has become more professionalised over the last few years, when we’ve talked about succession and who can take the reins, […] sometimes I imagine a younger version of me taking it on. But maybe that’s not where it is anymore, because the identity of the festival isn’t that. It’s more of a professional space than it was initially. And so sometimes I think, have I got the current identity of the festival in my mind? 

Stevens: If we could find a way to have paid roles, it becomes a much easier proposition to find someone who can devote the energy to it. Otherwise, as you say, you’re looking for a younger version of yourself, meaning that you’re looking for someone who has the requisite privilege to have a job that can support or another source of income that can support devoting time to this, as well as some motivation that this is something that adds value in their life, on top of a day job.

Monaghan: And then the other thing about that is that when I joined the festival I was in a really tight position of precarity in my job.[…] I don’t think I would feel good about asking someone in that state to do all of this extra labour just out of the goodness of their heart and the willingness to do community in the way that we do community in the festival. I want to protect people in that level of precarity and create opportunities where they can get properly paid for their work.

Stevens: The legacy of how the festival has evolved is we always started with that mission of supporting women filmmakers, and that’s diversified into non-binary and broader ideas of gender, but it’s also professionalised, so we really care about the labour conditions in which people work. And while we’ve been happy to continue to volunteer our time, […] we also don’t feel good about putting other people into our position.

Mitchell: There’s a difference, too, in that we started it from the ground up, and so there’s a kind of ownership of it that I think is going to be, obviously, very different for someone stepping into something that already exists and has a 10-year history.

Monaghan: And I think that also goes to [it being] a festival run by volunteers, where people are joining, working with us for a few years, and then using that experience to get excellent paid work somewhere else. So that’s sort of a challenge.

So what is next for MWFF?

Mitchell: Even if miraculously we get gender equality or equity in the industry or across screen culture or whatever, I still think we have a place to celebrate the work of these particular people and this community, and particularly because not everybody gets a space in a commercial cinema regardless. […] So I think that we should, we would always have a place to exist and to bring that community together.

Loreck: I also reject the idea that by supporting women and gender diverse people, we’re not supporting the rest of our filmmaking community. I think that we are building community for everyone, and while we are spotlighting particular groups because of the ongoing institutional, cultural, and practical barriers that those people face, […] we offer panels and development opportunities and screenings for everyone to come and attend, and I think we give back in so many ways to the community more broadly, and I think the festival will continue to do that.

Monaghan: In the critics lab one year, one of the mentors said this thing that I’ve held with me for a long time, which is that we were talking about how you find your community and she said, community isn’t something that you have, it’s something that you do. That makes me think about all the hard work that we put in, and that the filmmakers put in, and the critics put in, and everyone involved in various aspects of screen culture needs to put in that work to build a strong community. And that’s not something you can just benefit from without putting that work in.

Loreck: I would say the most valuable thing that I’ve learned is how meaningful it is for filmmakers to actually screen their works publicly in a cinema and to have the opportunity to talk about it afterwards. I don’t think I quite appreciated that before, and I’ve come to realise that so much work goes into making a film, and it can really just vanish into the ether afterwards if filmmakers don’t have an opportunity to have their work seen and talked about. So that has been a really powerful thing for me to learn. 

Stevens: I think something we’ve always strived for is to be a safe and welcoming and inclusive event, and to constantly reflect on what we’re doing as a festival. […] I hope that whatever the future of the festival is that remains paramount, that desire to be inclusive, and a recognition that being inclusive also means evolving and changing. 

Kirsten Stevens (University of Melbourne), Janice Loreck (University of Melbourne), Sian Mitchell (Deakin University), Whitney Monaghan (Monash University)

References

Anatolitis, E. ‘Key levers in arts policy: the vexed question of operational funding’ nava: National Association for the Visual Arts, 11 March 2020: https://visualarts.net.au/news-opinion/2020/key-levers-arts-policy-vexed-question-operational-funding/ (accessed on 2 April 2025).

Dickson, L. ‘Episodic Volunteer Management at Festivals: The Case of Valletta Film Festival, Valletta, Malta’ in Managing organisational success in the arts, edited by D. Stevenson. New York: Routledge, 2019: 147-170.

Donelli, C., Rentschler, R., Fanelli, S., and Lee, B. ‘Philanthropy patterns in major Australian performing arts organizations’, Journal of Management and Governance, Vol. 27, 2023: 1367-1396.  

Donelli, C. and Rentschler, R. ‘Strategic or Struggling? Professionalizing Philanthropy in Nonprofit Arts Organizations’ in Professionalization in the creative sector, edited by M. Wyszomirski and W. Chang. London: Routledge, 2023: 184-206.

Frost, W. and Laing, J. ‘Avoiding burnout: the succession planning, governance and resourcing of rural tourism festivals’, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Vol. 23, No. 8-9, 2015: 1298-1317. 

Holmes, K., Lockstone-Binney, L., Smith, K., and Rixon-Booth, A. ‘Managing festival volunteers: The HELPERS model’ in The Routledge handbook of festivals, edited by J. Mair. London: Routledge, 2018: 83-91.

Karlekar, T. ‘Precarity, Innovation, and Survival in the Indian Film Festival Sector’ in Rethinking film festivals in the pandemic era and after, edited by M. de Valck and A. Damiens. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023: 231-254.

Kuligowski, W. and Poprawski, M. Festivals and values: Music, community engagement and organisational symbolism. Cham: Springer, 2023.

Loist, S. ‘Percarious Cultural Work: About the Organization of (Queer) Film Festivals’, Screen, Vol. 52, No. 2, Summer 2011: 268-273.

Loreck, J., Mitchell, S., Monaghan, W., and Stevens, K. ‘Looking Back, Moving Forward: Retrospectives at the Melbourne Women in Film Festival’, Camera Obscura, Vol. 35, No. 2.104, 2020: 159-169.

Screen Australia. Gender matters: Women in the Australian screen industry. Ultimo: Screen Australia, November 2015.

Smith, K., Locksmith-Binney, L., Holmes, K., and Baum, T (eds). Event volunteering: International perspectives on the event volunteering experience. London: Routledge. 

Smith, K., Holmes, K., and Locksmith-Binney, L. ‘Event Volunteering From Motivation to Legacies’, Event Management, Vol. 29, 2025: 101-110.

Virani, T. ‘An Uncomfortable Truth? Rethinking the Relationship Between Neoliberalism and The Creative and Cultural Industries’ in Intimate capitalism: Political economy of labour and culture in creative industries, edited by B. Nayak. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024: 17-34.

[1] This article is authored by the four founding members of the Melbourne Women in Film Festival team.

[2] Australia’s previous longest running women’s film festival was the World of Women’s Cinema (WOW) Film Festival, later renamed For Film’s Sake (FFS). This event ran from 1996-2018 but has been on hiatus since 2019.

[3] The MWFF Critics Lab is, as best we can establish, the only festival-run film criticism mentoring program worldwide that specifically supports women and gender diverse writers. 

[4] For more information about the program and ethos of this first event see our article in Camera Obscura (Loreck et al. 2020).

[5] Anatolitis 2020.

[6] Donelli et al 2023. 

[7] Donelli & Rentschler 2023.

[8] Frost & Laing 2015; Virani 2024.

[9] Loist 2011, pp. 270-271.

[10] Loist 2011, p. 270.

[11] Smith et al. 2014; Kuligowski & Poprawski 2023.

[12] Dickson 2019; Holmes et al. 2018; Smith et al. 2025.

[13] Dickson 2019; Karlekar 2021.

[14] Holmes et al. 2018.

[15] A recent example is the research-led ‘Artrageous’ Australian experimental short film retrospective at the 2025 festival, which stemmed from Loreck’s research on Australian women’s avant garde and experimental filmmaking presented at the 2024 Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (SSAAANZ) conference. 

[16] Screen Australia’s Gender Matters: Women in the Australian Screen Industry (2015) report examined the rates of participation and representation of women in the Australian Screen Industry from 1970 to June 2014. A notable finding included the poor rates of participation of women in feature film production, where only 16% of directors, 30% of producers, and 21% of writers credited on films across this period were women.