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Those looking for a renaissance in the nation's cinema are hoping for an injection of much-needed leadership from Screen Australia's incoming chief executive, Ruth Harley.

Harley, who begins a five-year term next Friday, comes to the task with more than a decade's experience at the helm of the New Zealand Film Commission.

"It was quite a sad organisation, an organisation with low morale, and now it's definitely not that," she says of her tenure.

Working in Harley's favour was one giant film franchise, The Lord of the Rings. It transformed NZ's film infrastructure, bankrolling new studio space, digital-visual effects houses such as WETA Workshop and, of course, jobs.

Obviously such a phenomenon can't be manufactured. But how much can a government film agency or funding structure achieve? Most contemporary thinking suggests results can't be prescribed by government agencies. Indeed, Screen Australia's latest set of guidelines, released late last month, has been described by agency insiders as a "de-evolution of the agency role". Conversely, and indicating the confusion corroding industry confidence, Screen Australia's strategy suggests it plans to become involved in marketing and distribution of Australian films, areas most believe should be left to commercial experts.

Meanwhile, Screen Australia's interest in the one area of distribution it could be involved in to great effect -- digitising cinemas in the Regional Digital Screen Network program, thereby guaranteeing local films are screened in Australian cinemas -- appears to have dissipated.

For the new Screen Australia board, headed by IBM chief executive Glen Boreham, negotiating the film industry's many quandaries and contradictions will be a hard and convoluted road.

The challenge will not be helped by some of Garrett's selections for the board, who ticked political boxes but came light on in institutional memory or long-term production or distribution expertise. This combination of a new board with a fresh government has some industry practitioners fearing Screen Australia will make the same mistakes, rather than learn from those made during more than 35 years.

On the positive side, and suggesting moves towards a much-needed change to Australia's film industry culture, the new organisation is shifting responsibility for performance into the hands of film producers.

Convention says the FFC's often-prescriptive output failed during its 20-year life as its insular dramas and broad comedies failed to connect with audiences. Neither the flood of inane comedies earlier this decade, including Take Away and You and Your Stupid Mate, nor lauded dramas such as Somersault and The Proposition, attracted broad audiences.

Yet the FFC began strongly, arguably coalescing the volume of films and experience built during the '80s under the often-derided 10BA tax write-off scheme into a less random and abused film sector. Strictly Ballroom, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Green Card and Muriel's Wedding were among the first films it financed in what is now seen as its heyday.

We haven't replicated that era of commercial and global success, partly because no one truly understands what brought it about. Certainly, a group of emerging creative talent was discovered by more experienced producers who cut their teeth in the prolific '80s.

And it was an era when audiences weren't gun-shy of local cinema. Success begat success, just as failure begat failure in the early years of the present decade.

The years 1991-96 saw the release of six of the only 10 films to recoup their FFC investment: Green Card, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Muriel's Wedding, Shine, Sirens and Strictly Ballroom. (The other four were Napoleon, The Wog Boy, Rabbit-Proof Fence and Wolf Creek.)

Of course, recouping investments is not the primary focus of a cultural agency. Indeed, in its 20-year life the FFC invested $1.4 billion in 1079 projects, resulting in a total production value of$2.58 billion.

In its later years, it became a cultural patsy, chided as audiences rejected an increasing number of introspective local dramas. More worryingly, some hit comedies, including The Castle, The Dish and Kenny, were financed privately, without the FFC's largesse.

"The big question is, did the old system actually make Strictly Ballroom, Priscilla, Muriel's, Shine and The Piano all in the space of a few years?" producer Jonathan Shteinman asks. "I don't think any of those directors followed the system or tried to second-guess it, so then you have to ask: did the system then stop making (more of) those films happen?"

Unarguably so, according to comments by producer Antony Ginnane (since elected president of the Screen Producers Association of Australia) in a paper he wrote for Screenhub in May: "One cannot resile from the fact that by any objective commercial standards, FFC policies failed to improve the industry success rate; or to increase the involvement of the private sector or local or international distributors in the industry or (with a couple of exceptions) help create sustainable businesses. Neither did it re-engage Australian theatrical audiences with Australian cinema."

The reasons for Australian cinema's stasis since the mid-'90s -- and the FFC's contribution to it -- are many, varied and oft-quoted, including but not limited to: poor script development; the industry's welfare mentality; a wearying hand-to-mouth existence of film practitioners; inadequate development programs; no meaningful engagement with global distributors; a soft or tough media; clueless film agencies; and too little government funding.

But the film industry doesn't blame itself. Even the audience is at fault, but in cinema's ongoing hubris, the people who make the films are never at fault.

Former FFC chief Brian Rosen says: "It's not about the agency getting it wrong. An agency is really a conduit to help people get there. The agency doesn't create talent."

In Rosen's view, the key problem has been a dearth of new talent in the past decade. The '70s "new wave" threw up Miller and successful directors such as Peter Weir, Gillian Armstrong, Phil Noyce and Bruce Beresford. In the early '90s a similarly talented crop of directors emerged: Luhrmann, P.J. Hogan, Stephan Elliott and Scott Hicks are among those set to release films in the next 12 months.

Today's most successful Australian producers all cut their teeth in the '70s and '80s. And the number of globally recognised screenwriters? You can count them on one hand.

Rosen's time at the FFC was significant for his lambasting of the predictable, non-commercial fare being submitted for government funding, peaking with his lament earlier this year of "small films that appeal to about 100,000 people ... about lesbians, drugs and whatever else".

He concedes the industry has itself to blame for not finding, nurturing and developing the right people in the past decade. The guilty list includes film schools, screen agencies and even producers. Meanwhile, those talents who have made it through have been over-indulged. "Is it because we're middle class and comfortable and had a reasonable education that they want to write worthy stuff?" Rosen asks. "They're not really hungry for success, and they want to write something that wins awards and peer group recognition rather than something that is commercial because commercial is seen as crass."

Tristram Miall, producer of Strictly Ballroom and this year's highest grossing Australian film, The Black Balloon, is similarly frustrated.

"Like a lot of people, I would question why a lot of writers and directors want to do a lot of small, dark films. Because I don't see the evidence at the box office that an audience wants to see them, even though they find them creatively satisfying," he says. "I'm still surprised that there just aren't that many projects I see with mainstream appeal."

Of course, it's easy to ask our filmmakers to be more commercial.

And Rosen accepts there were limits to how a film could be funded: "It was a matter of ticking the boxes and the best way to do that was essentially to do drawing-room dramas."

Screen Australia's executive director, marketing support and promotion, Tait Brady, doesn't subscribe to the view that filmmakers second-guessed the FFC but he concedes genre films were on the nose for some time.

As the FFC wound up, he analysed 180 films that went past his desk in his four years as the FFC's evaluation manager. It provides a handy snapshot of the films that made it to the top of the film funding process. But it's also a narrow view that supports the contention that our filmmakers, and not necessarily the FFC, failed us.

"It wasn't meant to be critical and I wasn't defending the FFC," Brady says. "It was shocking to see what we all knew but in percentages, particularly the lack of adaptations."

The vast majority of projects were from Sydney or Melbourne; of the 180, 84 were by writer-directors, 63 were first features and less than 20per cent were by female writers. Brady classified just under half (85) the scripts as "downbeat, introverted, intense personal dramas", and categorised them in order of popularity as: personal autobiographical; coming of age-rite of passage; women and daughters damaged by parents; fathers and sons; mothers and sons; mothers and daughters.

Need it be said that none of the 10 highest grossing Australian films -- Crocodile Dundee, Babe, Happy Feet, Moulin Rouge!, Crocodile Dundee II, Strictly Ballroom, The Dish, The Man from Snowy River, Priscilla and Muriel's Wedding -- would be classified as downbeat or personal dramas?

"They were largely personal stories and that led us to wonder -- and we're not the first to say this -- has the dictum of 'write what you know' been taken too literally," Brady asks rhetorically. "It should be the foundation of the story, not literally the story."

He further defined common themes as desert and country town settings, bad or mad mothers, whitefellas' meaningful encounters with indigenous Australians, and immigrant stories. In the survey of four years, Brady rarely saw comedy scripts (only three romantic comedies), satire, family or children's films, or contemporary political drama, and surprisingly few adaptations. As if to emphasise the industry's schizophrenia, two recent adaptations co-funded by the FFC, The Children of Huang Shi and Disgrace, the screen version J.M. Coetzee's acclaimed novel, raised much ire because they were co-productions shot in China and South Africa and used little Australian talent. Critics, including at least one FFC board member, argued they were not deserving of FFC funding.