We are very excited to announce that in late July, Jennifer Venditti, the director of the acclaimed documentary Billy the Kid will be visiting Australia. Ms Venditti will be coming to Sydney after being a special guest at the 2008 New Zealand International Film Festival.

To coincide with visit there will be a special presentation of Billy the Kid at the Chauvel Cinema, with an introduction and post-screening Q&A with the director.

The screening will take place at 6.30pm on Thursday, 31 July.

ABOUT THE FILM

"I'm not black, I'm not white, not foreign... just different in the mind - different brains, that's all..."
-Billy

BILLY THE KID is a sensitive and humorous cinema-vérité portrait of Billy, a 15-year-old outsider growing up in small-town Maine. Billy appears, in many ways, like other teenage boys. He's into heavy metal and martial arts, is desperate to find a girlfriend, and aspires to a career as an actor and rock star.

Yet in other ways Billy is unique. A troubled past and ongoing behavioural issues have left him marked. But he is unapologetic about his personality and refuses to be victimized, creating his own techniques to help him survive in an environment of pain, conformity, and prejudice.

Billy is funny, sharp, strangely wise for his age, and remarkably candid. We witness life from his perspective - from intimate conversations with his mother, to being bullied at school, to his fantasies of becoming a superhero. We also experience the exhilarating pangs of first love as Billy pursues Heather, a shy 16-year-old waitress.

Will Billy get the girl? Will his community accept him on his own terms? BILLY THE KID challenges viewers to imagine themselves beyond labels.

REVIEWS

"Billy the Kid is a deceptively simple portrait of a shockingly self-aware and articulate young man: Quoting Robert Frost as easily as The Terminator."
- Jeanette Castoulis, The New York Times

"Many memorable dramatic films about adolescence have been made over the decades, but few of them can match the impact of BILLY THE KID, a striking, heartfelt documentary that deserves to have a long shelf life."
- Stephen Farber, The Hollywood Reporter

"The first twenty minutes alone is worth the price of admission for the contribution to furthering the language of documentary."
- Michael Lerman, indieWIRE

"Venditti believes in willing away labels and seeing beauty without demanding to understand it, and the film proves her right."
- Alicia Van Couvering, Filmmaker Magazine

"As quietly inspiring as it is genuinely heartbreaking, BILLY THE KID is an act of passionate empathy."
- Geoff Pevere, The Toronto Star

"The story of Billy resonates as that of an American anti-hero: a loner lost in a fantasy world."
- Claire Birchall, The Guardian (UK)

"BILLY THE KID ventures into a small, contained community to focus on a single life and thereby turns the camera on the world."
- Denis Seguin, Screen International

"Venditti's enormously affecting documentary about a thoughtful Maine boy's coming of age has won awards at all four of the festivals it's competed in. Believe the hype."
- Time Out New York

Billy the Kid will be released on DVD later in the year.