Real life is never as glamorous as it can be depicted on the silver screen. The director of the Canberra Film Festival 2018, Andrew Pike, says, "There's been a change in our financial structure - we have to rebuild our finances."

That means this year's festival will run for only three days, seven fewer than last year. Pike says, "We hope to be back to 10 days next year - we're working with what resources we've got."

The festival has also changed direction significantly, though that doesn't seem to be so much a matter of money as of choice.

"This is an entirely retrospective festival," Pike says.

The reason, he says, is that contemporary film festivals showing a wide range of movies from around the world are now frequently in Canberra cinemas.

"We can't compete with that, so we decided to do something that's distinctive locally and distinctive nationally."

The eight films in the festival include two Australian premieres, a series devoted to the first Australian to win an Oscar for best cinematography and two restorations of classics - one Australian, one French.

The idea, he says, is to screen films from the past but give them a contemporary context through discussion panels and introductions.

And two of the films on the program deal with cinema history.

"They're both beautiful films."

The Australian premiere of Searching for Ingmar Bergman, (2018, Germany) made by German feminist filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta is screening as part of the celebration of the great Swedish filmmaker's birth.

"She's looking in a very moving and poignant way at how Bergman's work really guided the development of her filmmaking journey."

Von Trotta interviewed Bergman collaborators and family members, shows his home movies and eventually discovered that not only has he influenced her, but she had also influenced him.

A darker aspect of film history is the subject of the other premiere, Cinema: A Public Affair (2015, Germany).

"It has contemporary relevance - it's about the destruction of the Moscow Film Museum [the Musey Kino] by a series of Russian bureaucracies."

The Musey Kino, founded by film historian Naum Kleiman in 1989, was evicted from its home in central Moscow ("within site of the Kremlin") and has struggled to survive.

It was viewed by the government as "a hotbed for radical freethinkers", Pike says, adding, "Klein was replaced by a party stooge."

Jean Renoir's Le Crime de M.Lange (1935, French) is one of the restorations, screening in 4K. In it, a small publishing firm is being run into the ground by its crooked owner. When he flees to escape creditors, the employees take it over and make a success of it.

"It took a lot of work ... It was a labour of love," Pike says of the restoration.

"It's a wonderful film."

The other restored film is Sunday Too Far Away (1975, Australia), a presentation of the National Film and Sound Archive Restores program. This Australian Film Institute best picture winner is about a group of shearers in 1955, particularly Foley (Jack Thompson, who won the AFI Award for best actor) with competition, drinking and a strike all part of the story.

Following the screening, members of the film’s cast and crew will be present for a Q&A;, including cinematographer Geoff Burton and co-producer Matt Carroll.

Also Australian is award-winning animator Lee Whitmore, who uses a variety of techniques in her work. She will discuss her films and present selections from them.

Pike says, "She presents scenes from her domestic life, scenes from childhood: they're like little documentaries."

Three films featuring cinematography by the Australian Robert Krasker will be a major feature of the program.

"Krasker was a flamboyant cinematographer," Pike says, adding that he used strong angles and striking camera moves to help tell cinematic stories.

One of the special guests at the festival will talk about the Krasker films. Burton is a veteran Australian cinematographer and director whose many credits in the former category - besides Sunday Too Far Away - include Storm Boy, The Year My Voice Broke and The Sum of Us (which he also co-directed).

"Krasker is a somewhat mysterious character," he says.

Born in Egypt on August 21, 1912 to Romanian merchant Leon and his Austrian-born wife Matilde, Krasker arrived in Perth with his family on November 15 that year and his birth was registered in Western Australia.

In 1930 he went to Europe to study art in Paris and optics and photography in Dresden. He began working as a camera operator and moved to London in 1932 and was on major productions including Rembrandt (1936) and The Thief of Bagdad (1940). By 1943 he was a cinematographer, his early films including the colour Henry V (1944) and the black and white Brief Encounter (1945).

He won his Oscar for The Third Man (1949, Britain) - screening on October 26 - directed by Carol Reed. Burton says Krasker explored the high-contrast possibilities of black and white in the film rather than using shades of grey like most cinematographers.

Krasker made use of unusual angles and shadows, vividly capturing the desperate, amoral atmosphere of post-war Vienna in which American pulp writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) searches for his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles).

Also in black and white is the second Krasker-shot film, The Criminal (1960, Britain), directed by American Joseph Losey who went to Britain during the Communist witch-hunts.

Burton was impressed by Krasker's exterior and interior shooting, the latter featuring low ceilings and exaggerated perspectives, particularly on a prison set. He will talk about Krasker after this screening.

In addition to being one of the major cinematographers in Britain, Krasker also worked on Hollywood films including Trapeze (1956), The Quiet American (1958) and the closing-night film of the festival, the Super Technirama 70 epic El Cid (1963, US/Spain), directed by Anthony Mann and starring Charlton Heston as the 11th-century Castilian nobleman and military leader Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar.

Burton says, comparing El Cid to the other two Krasker films in the festival, "It was completely different, with the massive budget and spectacle of its time."

Krasker's handling of colour was just as impressive as his black and white shooting, he says, with the vivid tones of three-strip Technicolor strikingly captured.

Burton, 72, has also had a long and varied career.

He says he loved cinema as a child - particularly enjoying American westerns and the British Ealing comedies - and, being technically minded, decided early on he wanted to be a cinematographer.

After a brief foray into pharmacy studies he started as one of the year's film trainees at the ABC in Sydney in 1963.

"There was no film school," he says.

"Media studies didn't exist."

Learning was on the job and as well as cinematography he learned about directing and other aspects of film and TV production that would serve him well.

In 1969 he went to Britain and freelanced in Europe, working for the BBC all over Africa. He returned to Australia in the early 1970s when the film industry was beginning to revive.

He worked on movies such as Storm Boy (1976) - a tricky shoot, he says, because much of it was shot outdoors in constantly changing weather and in television, including the mini-series Ben Hall (1975) - not seen in many years because of rights issues.

Other films have included John Duigan's coming-of-age story The Year My Voice Broke (1987) - "a wonderful film ... totally shot in Braidwood".

He says he and the art director worked together "to make a visual film about Australian rural country" while Duigan focused on the story and the actors, including rising stars Noah Taylor and Ben Mendelsohn.

Burton was also the cinematographer on the sequel, Flirting (1991).

He took over the thriller Dead Calm (1989) when original cinematographer Dean Semler "got an offer of a Hollywood film that had been on the table for some time" but doesn't regard it as a major credit.

"Dean was responsible for the bulk of the film on water," he says.

There are a lot of stories about actors and actresses being concerned about how they look on camera but Burton says he only encountered this once.

"An Australian actress who was advancing in years took a major role in a very naturalistic film," he says. He won't name either the actress or the movie but say it was a "frumpy" part.

"Her character was photographed the way it should be and she was offended by that."

But, he says, he mostly has a good relationship with the casts with whom he's worked.

He did double duty on the film adaptation of The Sum of Us (1994) starring Jack Thompson and Russell Crowe, working as a cinematographer and co-director. He shared the direction with American Kevin Dowling, who had directed the off-Broadway production of David Stevens' play but was making his film debut.

Working as cinematographer - let alone co-director - with an inexperienced director can be problematic, but Burton says the collaboration worked.

"Kevin knew the play really well. There was a lot of stuff I was 'teacher' about."

They had to deal with a competitive acting relationship between veteran Thompson as the widowed father and the younger Crowe as his gay son but exploited it.

"We played good guy and bad guy as directors - we took it in turns."

He speaks highly of director Ana Kokkinos, with whom he worked on his last feature film, Blessed (2009) but says he withdrew from filmmaking as digital cameras took over from film stock. He wasn't opposed to the new technology but didn't feel comfortable using it.

Burton has made some documentaries in recent years. He lives on a farm and his retirement activity is working with his winemaker son in the vineyard he bought a decade ago.

Unlike some of his colleagues, such as Semler, Russell Boyd and John Seale, he never wanted to establish a Hollywood career.

When, after Storm Boy, Burton's agent sent him Hollywood scripts - children's films, a baseball drama - he would ask himself if he really wanted to work on those movies. He decided he didn't.

"Unless you are obsessed with wanting to have an American credit ... what's the point? There's no point making a film you don't want to make," he says.

"I was always more interested in telling Australian stories. You don't get that opportunity in America."