I begin writing this from my motel room at the Wagon Wheel in Cloncurry, a small town 120 kilometres south-east of Mt Isa, on my way to Barcaldine for a festival in August. Last weekend I was in Bathurst, west of Sydney, on the other side of the Blue Mountains. On the same weekend that we run in Barci, we are also on in Orange and Darwin! Take a quick trip around the website and you'll see that Big Screen has hit the road again at full throttle. While I'm taking a one-month run through North Queensland - from Barcaldine, to Hervey Bay and Roma, and then back on up to Cloncurry - Richard Sowada will be running from Darwin to Broome and then down on through the WA wheat-belt to Merredin, Wongan Hills and Wagin.

But back to Bathurst for a moment.

About 200 kilometres west of Sydney, Bathurst is the oldest inland settlement in Australia. It's an old gold town and you can see the wealth in absolutely beautiful old houses and buildings.

It's probably most well-known for car racing, when six kilometres of public road transforms into the world-renowned Mount Panorama racing circuit. But Bathurst is not just about the rev-head; the education sector is one of the largest employers in the city. Charles Sturt University has a campus located here and there's also the Western Institute of TAFE and a seemingly vast number of public and private high schools, as well as the Conservatorium of Music. Manufacturing is also a large employer with industries specialising in food, timber, railways and transport. There's also the well-known Bathurst Correctional Centre.

If you're driving from Sydney, you battle your way through the seemingly endless western sprawl, which takes you all the way to Katoomba. It's not until you start to drop down the other side of the Blue Mountains, through Medlow Bath and Mt Victoria, and begin to make your way towards the old mining town of Lithgow, that you actually feel you've made it to the bush. The land is undulating, heavily forested and very green. It's an easy drive and you can see why those of Sydney who are not sun worshippers heading east to the coast turn in the opposite direction and make their way to this very pretty part of the world.

This is our second year in Bathurst and this time Metro Cinemas, our venue partner, is also running the entire festival in their cinema in Orange, another hour further west. The Bathurst manager Fiona Miller is a fantastic hard worker who must love her job. She's always there and always on the ball. It's her energy, along with very strong council support, that together are the locomotive to Big Screen.

It's funny that every town, every festival, has something special about it. For Bathurst and Orange, I've hooked up with an old mate, David Hannay, who lives on a beautiful old property 30 minutes east of town. Hannay has been producing films for almost 30 years - he's worth 'google-ing' or heading to imdb to check his filmmography, because he has made some fantastic films. He has a habit of working with first-time film directors and he is an unashamed lover of the 'genre' film.

A few years ago he made a great little kids' flick called Hildegarde, directed by Di Drew, who was trying to make a move from TV to film. It is a cute little kids' adventure film full of great messages and with a fantastic cast, - Tom Long, Richard E Grant and Tara Morice among them. For strange reasons, the vagaries of the distribution business high among them, the film never made it to the cinemas and went straight to DVD. Hannay and I chatted about the possibility of screening Hildegarde to the local primary kids, and also about putting together a retrospective of his works, to include films like Kadaicha, Stone and Vicious (which has never been released in Australia but was up for Cannes pre-selection a few years ago). Well we didn't get the retrospective going this year (next year we'll do something with Charles Sturt and Hannay as a campus-based program), but we did get Hildegarde up onto the Big Screen, and what a buzz for everyone. Six hundred primary school kids came to see it and loved it; Hannay got to stand up in front of them and tell them why he made the film for his grandchildren, and they got see and hear a truly passionate filmmaker, who looks like Santa Claus, imbue them with his wonderful sense of pride in filmmaking and making films for Australians. One class was so enthralled that they went back to school and as a project for the rest of the day made some absolutely wonderful drawings for David, which he will frame and hang around his house. Some are also featured on this page.

Craig Monahan, who directed the opening night film Peaches, flew up from Adelaide to present his film and had a wonderful time. Like so many of the filmmakers and actors who tour with us to country towns, he had an opportunity to enjoy an audience who thoroughly appreciated his work. The great thing about both the Bathurst and Orange screenings is that both cinemas put Peaches into a short season off the back of the festival, so it wasn't just our audience who had a chance to enjoy the film, but it sat there on screen for a week in each town, so everyone had that opportunity.

Next stop Barcaldine in Western Queensland, where we tour with Sam Worthington and Nat Dean who are in town to present Somersault, Getting' Square and A Rage in Placid Lake.

See you there!