Tabla de contenidos para No. 207 en Metro

High Ground (Stephen Maxwell Johnson, 2020) is an arresting and immersive film that uses the genre of the western to bring Australia’s past to life. It has been a long time coming for Johnson; while his journeyman career has included music videos and television work, he has not directed a feature film since 2001’s Yolngu Boy. High Ground has been well worth the wait, however. Its international premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2020 yielded international sales to Playtime in Europe, Samuel Goldwyn Films in the United States and Madman locally, shortly before global film exhibition ground to a shuddering halt. High Ground’s COVID-safe gala at the Adelaide Film Festival in October 2020 had the air of a truly special occasion: David Gulpilil, Rolf de Heer and…

Communication is commodified in A Family (Jayden Stevens, 2019). Its lonely central figure, Emerson (Pavlo Lehenkyi), holds auditions to find himself a set of parents and siblings whose paid interactions will be scripted and rehearsed before being performed for their employer. Each mundane family ‘event’ is greedily recorded by the protagonist’s bulky home-movie camera; it is clear that the process of producing a record of these interactions is of paramount importance. In fact, when the camera runs out of batteries, the entire production shuts down with immediate effect. Most of the characters remain nameless throughout, reduced to the essential signifiers of ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘sister’ and ‘brother’, and Emerson is only interested in his scripted dialogues; any interaction beyond the scope of his constructed reality is off limits. This dynamic is…

Baby Done, a dryly hilarious 2020 comedy from Kiwi husband-and-wife director Curtis Vowell and writer Sophie Henderson, opens by showing us its protagonist, Zoe (Rose Matafeo), as she sees herself. ‘I’m a leader; I’m a soldier; I’m an animal with supernatural powers,’ raps Wild Belle’s Natalie Bergman on the soundtrack as Zoe clips on a harness, straps on a helmet, nimbly climbs an enormous conifer tree and begins chainsawing off one of its branches. Her English boyfriend, Tim (Matthew Lewis), stands outside the designated branch-drop zone, also wearing an arborist’s safety gear. He looks anxiously up at Zoe and frets that she’s chainsawing one-handed. ‘You try and get it any other way!’ she retorts. Their dynamic is set: she’s bold and physically confident; he’s cautious and emotionally labile. (He can’t…

In the opening moments of the new Australian documentary Brazen Hussies (Catherine Dwyer, 2020), an on-screen intertitle notes that the women’s movement was ‘reignited’ between 1965 and 1975. That word stuck with me because, while it was most definitely true of that time period, it’s fair to say that the movement has once again reignited in the contemporary age. While the twenty-four-hour news cycle can allow for the impression that all movements are happening all of the time, social justice is often cyclical, and activism and justice have strong ebbs and flows. Issues that grab public attention inevitably lose their cultural marquee value at one point or another for something else, only to swing back around again when the political winds blow in that direction once more. This phenomenon can…

Major Leo Carmichael (Ewen Leslie) sits in a cafe in Adelaide, over 800 kilometres from the Maralinga nuclear-test site in a remote region of South Australia. At Maralinga, he is the boss, but he’s losing control: problems are spreading beyond the confines of the base as soldiers start getting sick and winds blow radiation from mushroom clouds across the state. According to the UK and Australian governments – as well as the scientists who conduct the tests for the greater good of the Commonwealth – however, what goes up in a nuclear blast comes straight down to the ground. And what’s on the ground? Nothing – or, for legal purposes, terra nullius. With all this on Carmichael’s mind, he turns to face a poster for a tobacco company with the…

In 2016, it came to light that a number of boys across various Australian schools had been involved in a series of cybercrimes against their female peers. Police were called in to investigate the sharing of nude images, including social-media pages set up specifically to encourage the secret acquisition and posting of illicit photographs – as well as stalking – of underage girls. One such Instagram account invited its followers to vote for ‘slut of the year’, and included images of girls as young as eleven.1 A little over twelve months later, the #MeToo movement gained traction after a couple of dozen women raised allegations of sexual assault and harassment against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. Originated in 2006 by American activist Tarana Burke, the #MeToo hashtag provided the opportunity for…

Back in 2015, the new film from Australian director Jeremy Sims, Last Cab to Darwin, did the rounds of the international festival circuit alongside an Icelandic film called Rams, directed by Grímur Hákonarson.1 The latter is an understated triumph of cinema, which, through the tale of two feuding brothers, meditates on the cycles of life and death; humankind’s relationship with animals, landscape and climate; and the emotional intricacies of family. The film would have sat at the back of Sims’ mind for a couple of years until producers Janelle Landers and Aidan O’Bryan approached him to direct an Australian remake based on an adapted script by screenwriter Jules Duncan.2 The result is Rams (Sims, 2020). Its predecessor is a beautiful film, touched by a sense of quiet, of repose, of…

Bloodshot Heart is one hell of a title. It’s evocative in a visceral way – in every sense of the word. For me, it calls to mind the image of a swollen heart, its crimson flesh straining against the polluted arterial liquid within: a manifestation of deep emotional scars. It’s a fitting title, then, for Parish Malfitano’s lurid first feature, which debuted at the 2020 Revelation Perth International Film Festival,1 with all the gory genre grotesquerie its title promises. Typically, this is the point at which I’d offer up a halfhearted synopsis of the film, but Malfitano’s screenplay isn’t so forthcoming as to lend itself to easy summary. The premise is straightforward enough, I suppose: Hans (Richard James Allen) is a decidedly off-kilter driving instructor whose life begins to veer…

In 2016, seventy-six female leaders in STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine) fields set foot on a boat to Antarctica: this is the bare-bones premise of Ili Baré’s fly-on-the-wall documentary The Leadership (2020), which quietly tracks the twenty-day-long inaugural Homeward Bound expedition, an experiment aimed at empowering women in science. Baré’s film becomes a microcosm of both the systemic barriers that these women face in their professional fields and, more extensively, the grittier complexities regarding the kinds of leadership and support that are required to achieve gender equality. The conceptual engineer of this venture is Fabian Dattner, an Australian ex-CEO with decades of experience as a leadership expert. The film’s prologue opens with her speaking over a shot of a ship surrounded by an endless ocean and towering ice…

When German Cabrera narrates his life in The Meddler (Alex Roberts & Daniel Leclair, 2020), he posits himself as a man on a mission. He may be a dumpy middle-aged mechanic in a polo shirt, fishing vest and dad cap – a father of five from a rundown neighbourhood in Guatemala City – but, in his mind, he’s a virtuous vigilante, the crusading hero of his own story. ‘They call me The Meddler,’ he says – so named, supposedly, for going into ‘places where he doesn’t belong’. Cabrera is essentially a pro bono stringer for news networks, an ambulance chaser and real-life Nightcrawler1 who comes running, video camera in hand, when the police scanner reports on violent crime. That’s a near-nightly occurrence in a city in which life is cheap,…

There’s a scene in the documentary Hong Kong Moments (Zhou Bing, 2020) in which Benny Yeung, a district councillor who’s been in office for twelve years, takes a taxi ride through the city. It’s 2019, so the conversation with the driver inevitably turns to the ongoing anti-government protests. It quickly becomes clear that they are on either side of Hong Kong’s intractable ideological divide: Yeung, a conservative politician; the driver identifying with the independence movement. Almost semantic disagreements between the interlocutors about who is responsible for the violence gripping the city – police or protesters – soon foment real hostility, the conversation turning from uncomfortable to heated in a blink. In the end, the driver asks the politician to stop talking; the rest of the journey takes place in uneasy…

In My Blood It Runs (Maya Newell, 2019) is a beautifully constructed documentary that tells the story of ten-year-old Arrernte/Garrwa boy Dujuan Hoosan. Filmed over a three-year period, it taps into the enduring strength and dignity of Aboriginal people and cultures, while also exposing the stress, struggle and conflict that arise from having to fit into the social structures, education and pathways that have been shaped by Europeans. Through getting to know Dujuan and his extended family, the viewer is immersed in his world of contrasts. In one frame, his cheeky smile and laughter fills up the screen; in another, we observe his reverence for his time-honoured culture and his awareness of his place within it. Elsewhere, however, his joy melts away, replaced by the dejection he feels in the…

‘Why don’t we just turn around and go back the way we came up?’ the eighty-year-old Paul Hogan, playing himself, asks at the outset of The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee (2020). In one of writer-director Dean Murphy’s wittier touches, the image that accompanies this plainly reflexive line suggests a visual pun on the phrase ‘over the hill’ – the hill in question being one of the Hollywood Hills, where Hogan has gone for a stroll with his mate Barney (Roy Billing). At present, the pair are wondering how to proceed, having just caught wind of a dangerous snake nearby. Hogan’s most famous fictional alter ego, Northern Territory crocodile hunter Mick Dundee, would know exactly what to do. This is less true of the Hogan of Mr. Dundee, a fictional construct…

Just as stories of gay men have tended to overshadow or even obscure lesbian history, until very recently the same has been true of cinematic depictions: the boys in the band hog the limelight. Ellie & Abbie (& Ellie’s Dead Aunt) (Monica Zanetti, 2020), which became the first Australian film to open the Mardi Gras Film Festival (MGFF) in February last year, brings lesbians to the fore for the change. Ellie & Abbie originated in 2017 as a Zanetti-penned and -directed play that debuted at the Depot Theatre in Marrickville, in her home town of Sydney. The original production starred Sophie Hawkshaw as driven high school student Ellie and Geraldine Viswanathan as her secret crush, the more forthright Abbie. With Viswanathan leaving the country to pursue a now-flourishing career in…

The opening scenes of Wild Things (Sally Ingleton, 2020) show the lush environment of the Tarkine in the Tasmanian summer. The area is, the documentary tells us, the second-largest tract of cool temperate rainforest in the world – and yet only 6 per cent of this area is fully protected from logging. The threat to the forest, however, is not the primary focus of the film. Instead, Wild Things depicts a year in the heart of contemporary activist campaigns in Australia, revealing the work and motivations of new generations of environmental activists. Their stories constitute the three threads of the documentary. In Tasmania, the film follows Lisa Searle, a GP who has for the last thirteen years been immersed in the work of protecting the state’s forests through processes of…

Three gunshots ring out and a woman repeatedly wails, ‘Oh my God,’ piercing a heartbeat-like drum loop. From the outset, filmmaker, photojournalist and artist George Gittoes’ gripping documentary White Light (2019) unsettles. Sixteen-year-old Englewood resident Li’l Dave raps this opening track, produced by Gittoes’ partner and music director Hellen Rose. It follows grainy mobile phone–shot images depicting a terrible procession of bodies bleeding in the street, cartoon hearts obscuring their faces. The song is a siren call expressing raw pain at the staggering cost of gang warfare and police brutality in Chicago’s South Side. Gittoes spent a year at the epicentre of this swirling violence shooting White Light, which bowed at last year’s Sydney Film Festival. His subjects had the last word on what ended up in the final cut,…

The Matrix (Lana & Lilly Wachowski, 1999) remains a rare 1990s blockbuster to have aged well. In an era of franchise films and intimidating special-effects budgets, the spark of originality that ignited the cyberpunk classic has endured where its contemporaries have largely slid into obscurity. The Matrix – filmed largely in Sydney – is well crafted, distinctive and engaging throughout, filled with compelling ideas and exciting action. Though its sequels aren’t quite of the same pedigree, it’s been durable enough to warrant a continuation, still filming at the time of writing.1 The film’s also jam-packed with intriguing scientific ideas, falling neatly in the middle ground between ‘hard’ science fiction – a subgenre driven by near-academic obsession with scientific accuracy – and the more accessible end of the genre. Sure, the…

Bliss (Ray Lawrence, 1985) is a film no-one quite knows what to do with. Despite winning several of the major categories at the 1985 Australian Film Institute (AFI) Awards, it’s a movie that doesn’t fit neatly within accounts of Australian cinema history. While some prominent critics such as Paul Byrnes have been fulsome and consistent in their praise over time,1 Bliss is still not widely discussed in generalist accounts of Australian cinema, even those that focus on the production boom and increasingly disparate output of the 1980s. Susan Dermody provides passingly positive commentary while positioning it within an ‘eccentric’, low-key strand of production largely centred in Melbourne; though Bliss, of course, is a profoundly Sydney film and less constrained in its form and sensibility than its sisters in this category.…