Philippe Mora

Philippe Mora (born 1949) is a French Australian film director. Origin Mora was born in Paris, France in 1949, and grew up at the centre of the Australian arts scene of the 1950s and began making films with an 8mm camera his father gave him while he was still a child, and won art prizes as a teenager. He is the eldest son of artist Mirka Mora and her husband, restaurateur and gallery owner Georges Mora, a French Resistance fighter during World War II. After a brief stint in New York, the family emigrated to Australia in July 1951 when Philippe was two, settling in Melbourne, where the Moras founded the Melbourne eateries Mirka Café and Café Balzac. Two younger brothers: William Mora (b. 1953), an art dealer, and Tiriel Mora (b. 1958), an actor., were born in Australia. In 1965 they opened the Tolarno Restaurant and Galleries in St Kilda. Career A self-confessed movie addict from childhood, Mora's cinema icons were the Marx Brothers, Jean Cocteau's surrealist films, Alfred Hitchcock, Buster Keaton (as director) and Ernst Lubitsch's early films, as reflected in his first home movies. Back Alley, now preserved at the National Film & Sound Archive, was made in 1964 when he was 15. This was a parody of West Side Story filmed in Flinders Lane, Melbourne just behind his mother's studio at 9 Collins Street. The film features Mora, his brother William, and friends Peter Beilby and Sweeney Reed. His next film, Dreams in a Grey Afternoon (1965) was made as a silent movie but was screened with music by artist Asher Bilu. Shot on 8 mm and printed on 16 mm, the film features stop-motion animation of sculptures by the Russian-Australian sculptor and painter Danila Vassilieff, and includes rare footage of Sunday and John Reed. His next project, Man in a Film (1966), was a pastiche of Federico Fellini's 8½ and was also influenced by his recent viewing of The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night. Like its predecessor, it was made as a silent film, shot on 8mm and blown up to 16mm, and again screened with music by Asher Bilu. Man in a Film starred Sweeney Reed and premiered at the Tolarno Galleries in early 1967.