Writing about cinema has always been a labour of love, and starting a small publishing venture is perhaps even more quixotic. Bring the two together and you have the ultimate passion project, the kind of enterprise that swallows years and repays in joy and excitement rather than a living wage.
‘I’ve only just given up my job in hospitality,’ says Annabel Brady-Brown with a laugh, speaking to Screenhub over a coffee in Bourke Street. We’re talking about the launch of Fireflies Press, a new independent publishing house for books about contemporary cinema. It’s run by the Melbourne-based Brady-Brown, a publisher, editor and freelance writer, and her friend and collaborator, Berlin-based film critic and Locarno programmer Giovanni Marchini Camia, in collaboration with Melbourne-based designer James Geoffrey Nunn. Each time they publish a magazine or book, they wonder how they can possibly afford to do the next one, and yet they do, and they have done every year since their first crowdfunded zine in 2014.
