Critics Campus 2026 participant Heather Fraser speaks to Adam C. Briggs about Australiana, autonomy and the prolific link between outré creativity and the ‘fuck-up freak’ community, as exemplified by his audacious fever dream Phillip Philadelphia.

Brisbane filmmaker Adam C. Briggs has quickly gained notoriety in the Australian underground cinema scene. Since 2021, he’s released four micro-budget feature films, including his super-8 descent into madness through the Queensland hinterlands A Grand Mockery (directed with Sam Dixon, 2024) and his XXXX Gold–drenched Boogie Bobby (2025), which screened across the country with live scores from local bands. His newest film, Phillip Philadelphia, is his first to screen at MIFF, and follows British dandy and screenwriter Phillip’s (Geoffrey Vagg) dying love affair with aspiring actor Antony Bogarde (Oliver Cameron). It explores stagnancy, frustration, and dreams of fame and fortune in the Gold Coast, and was created by Briggs’s close-knit team of independent artists.

Briggs is beloved for his idiosyncratic Australian stories about rarely represented regions of the nation’s north-east as well as their various distinctive, oddball residents. He has a unique approach to capturing the many different aspects of Australiana, giving his modern ocker figures more depth and diversity of experience than earlier cinematic depictions founded on stereotype. Each one is informed by the love, care and lived experience of the director. He’s also notorious for his entertaining, eccentric post-film Q&As full of untethered digressions, unplanned invitations for friends to come on stage and rambled responses that go well over the time assigned.

Phillip Philadelphia is set in the Gold Coast. Do you like this city?

I do like the Gold Coast. I like parts of it around where we filmed, [such as] Nobby Beach, Mermaid Beach. Largely, I don’t find it a particularly tasteful place … but I did love that motel [where Phillip stays in the film] very, very much … [The city is] a bit of a wasteland, in many respects. Lots of bizarre housing, luxury developments – it’s a strange mixture of those glitzy artificial canals and just a lot of emptiness.

There’s a great little video at the National Film and Sound Archive – it’s this TV interview with this child who is one of the first shark attack [victims] in the artificial canals … I think the kid was okay; the interview was with him in hospital, and he’d also the week before [the attack] just seen Jaws [1975], which is a strange detail.

There is a beautiful and truthful rendition of Australiana in all your films, especially Phillip Philadelphia. How do you feel about capturing Australia in your movies, and do you feel you have a responsibility to do so?

I would say I’m not consciously trying to depict the Australiana aspect … I definitely feel a responsibility as a filmmaker here to include a wide array of things I observe and encounter. I suppose my films and life all depend heavily on a fairly heterogeneous array of people in terms of the community in Brisbane, which is at times seemingly in immense contradiction with itself, but it is an ecosystem that I heavily rely upon … Those things just flow back and forth between life and the projects that we work on.

I’m intrigued by your choice to make a film about a dandy in the Gold Coast.

Well, Phillip is a typical out-of-place character, so I was thinking of a lot of late-19th-century protagonists or antiheroes out of step with their time, lamenting a lost age. In this case, I saw him as being profoundly alienated from the place but also connected to it and desirous of certain elements of it, of this perceived luxury and glamour – [the] colonial overtones. I saw him as being covetous of some of that life … The Gold Coast seems like an opportune place for him to crop up. The film’s also set in 2029, so it kind of hovers back and forth there between different modes.

In 2029, the Gold Coast will be crawling with dandies!

We can only hope! … I was regretting that I wasn’t [filming in the Gold Coast] during that cyclone that came in a year or two ago, and unfortunately it eroded a lot of the beach. But that [post-cyclone] landscape was what I had in mind. [For] the ending of the film, I [thought of] the end of Planet of the Apes [1968]; I wanted to do some VFX with some of those buildings getting exploded, but I erred on the minimalist side.

Phillip Philadelphia

As a screenwriter, Phillip wants to make it in Hollywood. Do you share that dream, or do you relish being among the independent and the underground?

I get asked that a lot – increasingly so … Being firmly lodged in Brisbane without any intention of moving to any larger cultural scene in the country or elsewhere, that bespeaks a certain commitment to the fuck-up freak community of artists.

I have sometimes entertained making something commercial. I think it would be an interesting exercise, but I also don’t know if I have the talent for that specific mode of filmmaking … I’m most comfortable digging in the weeds of Brisbane and its surrounds with my beloved cohort, which is an increasingly connected group with other art scenes around the place as well.

You have a wonderful array of actors, many starring across several of your films, who all suggest storied lives. How do you pick and direct them?

Casting, for me, much like script writing, is a very superstitious and arcane process. In terms of people coming into roles, it is a lot of people that I’ve worked with before, so sometimes I’m just thinking of them for those reasons. But with every film, there are still new performers that come in, and it seems like something set down in the grand schedule of providence. With any small independent film, there’s less of a normal process of casting. But they end up there somehow, and I’m really proud of everyone in this particular film.

With [Phillip Philadelphia], there was a pretty defined script, but the rehearsal process and production was very inviting of material from the performers, so the end result is something that contains a lot of profound shared meaning. I’m not particularly interested in film or art that imposes a kind of authorial vision on things – [the] thought of that just makes me sick … I’m [more] into the communal sludge and then crafting hopefully something very defined and specific out of that, [which] creates its own world.

Any ideas on the horizon?

I’m going to make silent films.

Phillip Philadelphia screens in cinemas on Friday 7 and Sunday 9 August as part of the MIFF 2026 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.