The director of the hit Australian film The Dressmaker, Jocelyn Moorhouse, has slammed the federal cuts to arts organisations and raised concerns about the future of film funding.

"It's really frightening," she said. "It makes you wonder what it says about the leaders of our country if they don't see the importance of supporting the voice of its people through the arts because that's what the arts represent."

Speaking as the National Film and Sound Archive launched a crowd-funding campaign to restore her breakthrough film Proof, Moorhouse said last week's funding cuts to arts organisations had sent filmmakers into a panic.

"If they can do it to these companies and these longstanding arts organisation, they could do it to film next. And film is already endangered – feature film production," she said. "There's less and less being made unless it's a superhero movie so where do we turn next?"

More than 60 well-established arts organisations are believed to have missed out on federal support, including the National Association for the Visual Arts, literary magazine Meanjin, Centre for Contemporary Photography, dance company Force Majeure and physical theatre company Legs on the Wall.

While 128 groups received multi-year funding, there has been industry dismay at the impact of heavy cuts to the Australia Council for the Arts and the creation of the controversial Catalyst funding program.

"It's a massive blow to the arts community," Moorehouse said. "These are people that work, that have to pay mortgages. It's an industry like any other and it gives them money to live."

Moorhouse said she was honoured that Proof had been chosen for restoration, with the Archive launching a crowd-funding campaign to raise $25,000 towards the project.

It is part of a program to digitise classic and cult Australian films that were shot on film, which means they cannot be played in digital cinemas.

A comic drama that won best film at the Australian Film Institute Awards in 1991, Proof starred Hugo Weaving as a blind photographer and featured strong performances by Genevieve Picot and Russell Crowe in one of his first films.

"I've been very aware of film preservation for a number of years," Moorehouse said. "Martin Scorsese was at the forefront of raising awareness of the need to preserve the classics in America.

"But it's funny, I just didn't realise that my film was that old. That suddenly it was going to apply to me. Then I thought, wow, there are so many fantastic films that if they're not being preserved, we're not going to be able to see them."

After the success of The Dressmaker, Moorhouse has been writing her next film, Clara, a love triangle centring on German musicians and composers Clara and Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, hoping to shoot it early next year.

"I'm wrestling with it," she said. "It's a giant project but it's going very well."

She is also developing a murder-mystery mini-series with her director husband P. J. Hogan.

"It's one of my favourite projects that I've never quite managed to crack as a feature then it dawned on me that it could be a really fantastic mini-series."