Stuart Richards

Stuart Richards and the Importance of Immersion

Academic, writer and film critic Dr Stuart Richards was a reluctant transplant from Melbourne to Adelaide.

He had never considered moving to the smaller city until a job that combined his two areas of expertise – film and festivals – came up at the University of South Australia. It felt impossible to ignore.

“I had no choice, really,” says Stuart. “Because the university education system is so precarious for staff, and when that job came up it was so perfect that my options were move to Adelaide or realise that you don’t want to be a lecturer. And I did want to be a lecturer, I did want to continue my career in academia, so I moved to Adelaide.”

Fortunately for Stuart, when he arrived to begin his new role as Lecturer in Screen Studies, which also included teaching the Festivals major as part of a freshly minted Bachelor of Creative Industries, he was welcomed by a city in full flight.

Crossing the border in early 2019, he found himself surrounded by friends from Melbourne who were visiting Adelaide to perform as part of the city’s busy festival season, colloquially known as Mad March.

“I got to acclimatise to the city when it was on, when Mad March was happening,” he says.

“That was good. I think when Mad March was over, that’s when the city quietened down and that was a bit of a culture shock, because back in Melbourne I was on the radio.

I was teaching a lot, going out to a lot of festivals, so going from that very busy lifestyle to a quieter one was a bit of a shock.”

But after digging a little deeper into the city, and learning quickly about its ebbs and flows through the Festivals major he was teaching, Stuart realised the quiet was misleading.

While Adelaide might not have been wearing its cultural heart so loudly year-round, it was still beating.

Some of Stuart’s most affecting Adelaide festival experiences have taken place at queer arts and culture festival Feast and the Adelaide Film Festival – both of which happen well outside of the Mad March window, taking place in November and October respectively.

It was at an Adelaide Film Festival screening of High Ground that he was reminded of the qualities that originally ignited his passion for festivals.

“There is just this experience and vibe in a film festival screening that is heightened, I find, particularly if the director’s there or if there’s going to be discussion afterwards,” Stuart says.

“And my research background is the queer film festival… Going to a Queer Film Festival screening, where you are surrounded by other queer people, you never get that.

You never get that experience of being in a theatre full of other people who identify with being LGBTQIA+, so that experience as well is very different… You’re allowed to give yourself over to being immersed in the film.”

Reminded of and inspired by the sense of camaraderie and community that he felt in the cinema that night, Stuart was motivated to dive deeper into the Adelaide scene.

Alongside teaching the next generation of festival workers through the UniSA major, he’s invented new ways to contribute to the scene.

He was a key player in chronicling Feast’s history in celebration of its 25-year anniversary in 2022 and he organises regular queer film screenings at Goodwood’s Capri Theatre.

Now fully woven into the cultural fabric of Adelaide, Stuart is an enthusiastic adoptee of the festival city. But understanding appreciating you’ve got comes with a downside: the fear of losing it.

“Now, after a few years of COVID, we realise how little funding arts and culture get and how vulnerable they are to the significant lack of funding they’ve been getting,” Stuart says.

“I think it’s made a lot of people realise how important the act of going to a public event is, sharing this in-person experience with other people.

“And being a festival city, it ties a lot of our events to tourism.

So, a lot of folks would be coming to Adelaide purely for the Mad March experience… I think it just signals just how important it is to keep on supporting festivals.

And also, not just the big ones like the Adelaide Festival and Fringe, but smaller ones like the History Festival and Feast, they’re just as important for the makeup of Adelaide being a festival city.”

In the span of a few short years, Stuart has transformed from reluctant transplant to a strong advocate. It was festivals that brought him to the city, and now his passion for them will fuel the city’s future.

“You’ve got to make your own culture and lifestyle,” he says.

“I find, that it’s very easy to just kind of retire to a quiet life in the suburbs but you’ve really got to make sure that you’re aware of what’s happening in the festival space, what’s happening in arts and culture, and realise that… there’s a lot happening.

“It’s why I’m here.”

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This article is part of the Festival City Stories series, a collection of reflections about Adelaide made by the people who make this a festival place. The project was funded through the Department of Premier and Cabinet, Arts South Australia, Arts Recovery Fund, and delivered in partnership with the State Library of South Australia. 

Written by: Farrin Foster

Photography by: Sia Duff