Politics & Power Quote by Bruce Beresford

There is a quietly radical idea hiding in Beresford's plainspoken praise: a government treating cinema less like a luxury product and more like cultural infrastructure. His phrasing, "kick films off", is almost sheepish, as if he knows how strange it sounds in markets where movies are expected to bootstrap themselves into existence or die. Calling the move "enlightened" signals more than gratitude; it’s a value judgment about what a nation owes its storytellers.

The subtext is about gatekeeping and risk. Film is a high-cost art form where early financing determines who gets to speak and what kinds of stories survive past the script stage. A "government bureau" implies bureaucracy, yes, but it also implies a counterweight to private capital's narrow appetite: safer bets, bankable genres, familiar faces. Beresford is pointing to a system that can underwrite the unproven, the locally specific, the weird - the kind of work that often builds a national cinema rather than merely feeding a global content pipeline.

Context matters: Australia in the late 1960s and 1970s was actively constructing a modern film industry, with public funding helping spark what became known as the Australian New Wave. Beresford, a key figure in that movement, is implicitly describing an ecosystem that made careers possible, not just individual films. The line also carries a faint nostalgia for a moment when governments were willing to place a civic bet on imagination - and when showing up with a script didn't feel like an indulgence but a legitimate claim on public support.