Leaving Roma I am now travelling with a camera person, Arianna Bosi. We're going to shoot two small documentaries in our final Queensland destination, 1,200 km north west.

On the way up I stop in Winton, a day's drive, to meet locals and begin planning a festival for 2006. Winton has an amazing old outdoor cinema, The Royal, which would make an ideal venue and Nick Cave's The Proposition, with Guy Pearce and David Wenham, was shot there last year so the town has the movie bug well and truly now.

The Curry is about 120 kilometres east of Mt Isa in Queensland's central north-west. It's the true outback, not quite the desert but getting there. The temperature at the end of winter and beginning of spring sits in the low 30s and the Curry has the highest temperature on record to its credit, 53 degrees celsius. The weekend that we run is shared with the Birdsville races, which are close enough, for locals at least, to travel to for the weekend. Everyone out here is used to big distance travelling so a day there and back is just a blink. Towns like Cloncurry are built on people getting together for a yarn and a 'goldie' whenever they can. The roads are straight, there are no traffic lights and the only dangers are the 'roos, cattle and cops. You can travel for hours with no phone reception.

Even when you pull into road stops, with names like Kyuna and McKinlay, for food and fuel you're cut off completely from the outside world. These highway pit stops have old watering holes, pubs with names like the Blue Heeler, and if you're there 'round noon or six, they fill with locals who seem to come from nowhere. Because you've seen no sign of human habitation on your way in, you have to wonder where they are coming from, spiriting off properties and mines. This is mining and cattle country; it's the land of big road trains hauling either meat or ore for processing.

Cloncurry was once a big cattle town with dozens of huge old pubs and four cinemas in its heyday. It was the centre of a big pastoral industry. Now mining is the major employer after transport, roads and cattle, and the town is smaller but no less spirited. The mine puts money into town to develop infrastructure and culture. A strange mix but one that seems to keep everyone happy.

Our venue in the Curry is the Bio Outdoor Cinema and the owners Dom and Mark Horne are a real powerhouse duo. Mark runs the movies and Dom his wife runs the cafe. There would be no festival without these two; Mark really busted a gut to get the school screenings organised. The Bio was one of the original cinemas and the name actually comes from a cattle brand: B Ten or B10. In its day it had a balcony and restaurant, and was the social hub of town, particularly for the younger population who could not meet in pubs.

Cloncurry also seems to have a large Indigenous population that makes for a great sense of community. Apparently this goes back to the old cattle station days from the late 19th century when the Aboriginal roustabouts and their families came in to work on the stations and, like the 'whitefellas', just stayed.

We convert the youth centre into a cinema to run the school screenings over two days, and the kids from St Joseph's and the State School have a ball. You see it on their faces, that wonderful entranced stare as the younger ones watch The Magic Pudding or Storm Boy, and hear in the laughter as the seniors really get into The Big Steal. The Curry is a town where you really feel as if you're doing your job. We talk to a lot of the kids after the screenings and it turns out that for many this is the first time that they have seen an Australian film on the Big Screen, and they just loved it. Now at least the 200 kids who sat and watched classic local films will have that memory of their own culture up there.

Over four nights we screen Mad Max, Babe, A Man's Gotta Do and Hating Alison Ashley, and every night works. Before Babe and A Man's Gotta Do we screen a three-minute micro-doco on the locals, shot and edited by Arianna in amazingly quick time. She does a beautiful job, giving the community a chance to see their kids in the thrall of Australian films. To be able to do it on the Big Screen, and just one day after it all happened, gives the festival and town a sense of being very special. This micro-doco will be available on the Big Screen website soon. Keep an eye on the Cloncurry town page.

Next stop Bendigo. See you there

Peter Castaldi, Festival Director