IN a long-awaited announcement, the Canberra International Film Festival has revealed that its new artistic director will be Lex Lindsay, the former artistic director of “Queer Screen” and Sydney’s Mardi Gras Film Festival.

He will be the third director of the festival and replaces Simon Weaving, who sent shock waves through the Canberra screen community in December by resigning on the grounds that that the festival board was lacking in “vision.”

Yesterday Weaving was tight-lipped about his relationship to the festival, preferring to praise his successor. “Lex is a lovely, talented programmer and I look forward to see seeing what he produces,” he told “CityNews”.

It is understood that Weaving challenged the board’s view of the festival as a once-a-year event, preferring to see it as a Canberra arts organisation. At the time, the president of the festival, Nicole Mitchell, said Weaving had “long wanted to expand his role into a bigger, year-round arts organisation, which is neither the goal or objective of CIFF”.

But Lindsay will be no pushover. An honours and masters graduate from the Drama Centre at Flinders University in SA with a background in theatre, he was the founding programming director for the ambitious new Cockatoo Island Film Festival. He selected and curated Australian content for the Dungog and Inland NSW Film Festival, (Dubbo) including 10 feature films, six feature-length documentaries and 60 short films.

He introduced filmmaker development programs and master classes into his festivals and will doubtless be keen to program discussions, and outreach features into this one. As the chair of Queen Street Studio, an initiative that transforms disused properties into thriving arts studios, he is likely to be full of ideas for embedding the festival even further into Canberra community.

Today, Lindsay was talking the talk that Canberrans like to hear, saying: “I’ve curated festivals in a lot of places around the country, but I can honestly say, no location has inspired me as much as the nation’s capital. Canberra is our heart of ideas and debate and is deserving of a festival that is as unique and significant as the city herself.”

But there’s no time to rest. As his other predecessors have done, Lindsay will soon be off to the Cannes Film Festival in search of the top new films.

Mitchell praised Lindsay, saying, “his insightful and thoughtful film programming, combined with his inclusive approach to audience development, will definitely delight Canberra’s film lovers.”

There seemed to be little doubt of his capacities, but Weaving’s thorough knowledge of the Canberra arts community will make his a hard act to follow. Building on the loyalty of film festival lovers initially courted by founding director Michael Sergi, a lecturer at University of Canberra, Weaving saw audience numbers rise to 17,000 last year.

The board of the Canberra International Film Festival has taken a gamble in appointing a gifted out-of-towner, but if you look at the example of Robyn Archer as creative director of the Centenary, it’s probably one worth betting on.

The Canberra International Film Festival runs from October 30 to November 10.