Prepare to be swept off your feet as Brisbane welcomes the BLUSSH Romance Festival, the city’s newest festival celebrating films and literature through a romance lens. The festival, the first of its kind in Australia, is set to take place from February 22nd to 25th, 2024, promising an enchanting experience for lovers, dreamers, storytellers, and romance enthusiasts alike.
The festival boasts a diverse program that includes premieres, previews, retrospectives, iconic classics, and adaptations from book to film. Romance literature and its subgenres will be explored across three panels during the festival, featuring notable authors and industry experts.
The pink carpet will be rolled out at the Angelika Film Centre, the home of BLUSSH in Woolloongabba, for the Opening Night Gala with the Australian Premiere of One Perfect Match, a film shot entirely on location in Brisbane and produced by the renowned Jaggi Entertainment. The romantic drama follows matchmaker Lucy Marks as she navigates the complexities of love and professional life. The film will be followed with a post-screening Q&A featuring Director Jo-Anne Brechin and principal cast members with an After Party to wrap the evening.
Leading up to the festival’s opening night, Nick L’Barrow spoke with festival director, Sue-Anne Chapman, and Head of Film Programming, Sasha Close about what people can expect at the inaugural BLUSSH Romance Festival!
Nick: I’d love to kick off where BLUSSH all started! How did this festival come about?
Sue-Anne Chapman: So, my dear friend Kylie Pascoe, who is Vice President of Jaggi Entertainment, have known each other for many, many years. We started working together 12, 13 years ago with the Gold Coast Film Festival. And now, [Jaggi Entertainment] have absolutely cornered the market with their romance films that they produce. They’ve made a tonne, and have extensive relationships with Netflix and Hallmark!
And we were sort of having a chat back in November about what she was doing with the romance films, and she said, “Queensland produces more romance films than anywhere in Australia!” And I was doing research on romance literature because I just spent 12 months with the State Library of Queensland, working with the Brisbane Writers Festival, and we had a lot of romance writers that are best sellers that have numerous awards! I said, “I think Queensland has a market here!”
So, we just got to talking more and more, and I thought we should do a romance festival that focuses on films and books, and boom, then BLUSSH was born. And BLUSSH with two S’s because it’s twice as sweet!
Sasha Close: Yeah, great question! I know Sue-Anne and Kylie Pascoe from working with them across the many film festivals we’ve done. And it really started as kind of embryonic conversation. They had an idea, and they said, “What do you think?” And I said, “Well, I’m a huge fan of rom-coms!” Even though I’m a cinephile!
I asked them to let me know if it gets of f the ground, and they circled back a couple of months later and now we’ve pulled together the inaugural program in the space of about two months! It’s super exciting!
Nick: One of the festival highlights has to be the Australian premiere of One Perfect Match, which is a Brisbane-based production! How important was it to you both to programme this particular film for BLUSSH?
Sue-Anne Chapman: It’s a beautiful, traditional love story! And yes, all shot completely in Brisbane and South City Square, which is where we’re holding the festival hub. So, people who come to the festival will be able to see the staircase, and the city square, which is really lovely. It’s quite an intimate film!
And it’s a Jaggi Entertainment film, so we were able to secure the Australian exclusive premiere for that, which is really wonderful!
Sasha Close: Some of the initial discussion for the festival did kind of start about how Brisbane is producing a significant number of romance books, and also romance films. So, based around that idea, we wanted to be faithful to presenting in a key slot, a film that was produced in Brisbane! That just made obvious sense to us.
And a premiere status is really important as well. It just seemed like the perfect film to put in that slot and show off Brisbane and all the amazing talent that there is there.
Nick: And that’s just the opening night! What else can festival goers expect during BLUSSH Festival?
Sue-Anne Chapman: We have three author events, with Brisbane and Queensland authors! We have H.M. Hodgson, who is a Brisbane writer. Stacey McEwan, who a lot of people will know through her Tik Tok fame where she has over 350,000 followers and is just about to release her third book in a trilogy of fantasy romance. And we have the queen of romance, Miss Amy Andrews, who has a back list of 80 books and has won numerous awards! So, there’s going to be wonderful panels.
Sasha Close: We really looked at romance as kind of an umbrella, and then went into all the sub genres. We wanted to include films that were newer, and some iconic retrospectives as well. We were really keen to include as many films as we could. But being the inaugural festival, we nailed it down to 8.
Sue-Anne Chapman: Throughout the three days we have a couple of iconic gems like Twilight, which really started the tween angst-vampire fantasy romance and was a book to film adaptation!And Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 classic Romeo and Juliet. We have a beautiful film called The Great Escaper, which is the last film Michael Caine shot. And The Gift That Gives, which is a really great Australian premiere, and the director Joy Hopwood will be here for a Q+A! Then we bookend with Greatest Days which is quite an interesting film that’s based on the Take That! Musical, but it’s more about you first love. It’s a really fun and uplifting film.
Plus, we have the festival hub, which has BLUSSH inspired markets on the Saturday. And the beautiful gelato store has done a BLUSSH inspired gelato! It’ll be great to see people immerse themselves in the festival hub!
Nick: This really seems like a festival that is celebrating so many aspects of love in fiction. Was that always something important to you?
Sue-Anne Chapman: It was really, really important. And we wanted to reflect not only the tropes, or the sub genres, but make sure there was representation across all parts of love. Because, at the end of the day, love is love. Life is better with a love story! I’m stealing that quote from an amazing woman in the States called Lesley, who has a romance blog, and that’s how she signs each blog off!
Because this is our inaugural year, we only have a couple of days, so we haven’t told all the stories that we wanted to tell. But year on year, we hope that we can grow and show that BLUSSH is really a safe space for people to come along and enjoy some beautiful events.
Nick: How have you found romance has changed and evolved in fiction over time?
Sasha Close: I think broadly, film reflects changes in society. And that’s probably where we’re seeing in romance films. One of my favourites is Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but you can watch it now and it feels a little cringey. Fast forward to Bridget Jones’ Diary, and there’s a lot of agency in that film. It showed women can pursue love and have agency in that.
I think we’re moving into stories now that are not just showing the romance between males and females. There’s a lot more queer romance, or fantasy romance. I do think what film shows us changing in society, and it’s really great to see that film can represent culture back to itself. And perhaps sometimes, it’s more ahead of the culture than people are thinking! It’s really neat, and it’s really important.
Thank you so much to Sue-Anne and Sasha for their time. The BLUSSH Romance Festival will be taking place at South City Square in Brisbane from February 22nd to 25th. For the full program schedule, ticket information, and more details about the BLUSSH Romance Festival, visit www.blusshromancefestival.com.
