Co-presented with The Good Copy

Film lovers! Get into the MIFF swing of things before Opening Night with Trailer Blazers: a fan romp through the trailers of the best, weirdest and most wonderful film highlights of the festival.

If you’d prefer to do your MIFF trailer watching in the company of other trailer watchers while competing in a trailer-based trivia competition, this might be the perfect pre-festival fling for you.
 
First presented in 2015 by local word nerds The Good Copy as an unsanctioned, off-program event, Trailer Blazers is now an official part of the MIFF Talks program – but it retains its unofficial spirit.
 
There will be film trivia! Prizes! A people's choice vote for the most popular trailer! MIFF programs to rifle through!
 
The evening will be hosted by Brodie 'Margaret' Lancaster and Kane ‘David’ Daniel of The Good Copy with special guests including MIFF’s Artistic Director Michelle Carey, programmer extraordinaire Al Cossar and some of Melbourne’s friendliest local film directors.

Brodie Lancaster
Brodie Lancaster is a writer and editor from Melbourne whose work has been published in places such as New York magazine, Rolling Stone, Rookie, Pitchfork and Jezebel. She is a manager editor at The Good Copy and the founding editor of Filmme Fatales, a zine about women in cinema. Her first book, a pop-culture memoir called No Way! Okay, Fine. (Hachette), came out in July 2017.

Kane Daniel
Kane is a writer, editor and humble content farmer – plowing the addled fields of his mind for thought potatoes to throw into the internet's greedy maw. He's been a national editor at The Thousands city guides as well as a sometime contributor to Vice's various shopfronts, Smith Journal and wherever will let him make a Steely Dan reference. He writes the Rooftop Cinema newsletter from his desk in the creative wing of The Good Copy's client-services department and would probably make a 'likes X as much as Y' assertion (where X is a relatable, pop-culture cinema touchstone and Y is some Tarkovsky snoozefest or something) if he didn't think it would make him sound like everything he hates.

Cris Jones
Cris Jones is an award-winning Melbourne-based filmmaker. His short films The Funk, Excursion and The Heisenberg Principle have screened at over a hundred international film festivals, including New York, Edinburgh, Rotterdam and SXSW. After graduating from the VCA, Cris received the Emerging Filmmaker Awards of both MIFF and the Film Critics Circle of Australia. He was part of MIFF’s inaugural Accelerator program and his debut feature, The Death & Life of Otto Bloom, was the Opening Night Film of the 65th MIFF.

Colin Cairnes
Colin and Cameron Cairnes' debut feature, 100 Bloody Acres, had its world premiere at MIFF 2012. In 2013 the film was released in the US to wide acclaim. 100 Bloody Acres went on to win the Midnight X-treme award at the 2013 Sitges Film Festival and received an AACTA nomination for Best Original Screenplay. The brothers’ second feature, Scare Campaign, picked up four awards (including Best Film and Direction) at Monsterfest 2015. In 2016, Colin directed and Cameron edited all six episodes of the twisted new ABC/SeeSo comedy series Fancy Boy. They recently facilitated a horror film workshop in collaboration with Screen Australia’s Indigenous Department.

Zak Hepburn
Zak Hepburn is a Melbourne based film critic and cinema manager. Zak currently appears on the nationally broadcast ABC News Breakfast program, as the resident film critic for the weekly Now Showing segment. Additionally, Zak is the General Manager of Melbourne's iconic Astor Theatre, in which he curates and operates the Astor eclectic program of repertory and event cinema. Zak is also the current chair of the Australian Film Critics Association.

Alex Heller-Nicholas
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is a film critic on Melbourne radio station Triple R on the Plato’s Cave program, and a co-editor of Senses of Cinema. She writes books about cult, horror and extreme cinema.

Simon Winkler
Simon began as a contributor for street press in Sydney before accepting a role at SBS youth arts, music and talks program Alchemy. After a brief stint working in London and Berlin as a freelance radio producer, Simon packed his mp3 collection and returned to Melbourne to start his dream job as Music Coordinator at Triple R FM. Each week, Simon co-presents a new releases music show called Breaking and Entering, and for a couple of years was also an editor at THUMP, VICE's electronic music and culture channel. Little known fact: Simon is on the list of standbys if Daft Punk need someone to accept a Nobel prize for literature on their behalf.