Table of contents for No. 181 in Metro

In Rolf de Heer’s latest film, we see disheartening depictions of how Aboriginal Australians in the far north struggle against government intervention, ill health and ongoing poverty. But according to Thomas Redwood, the film is just as much about the harsh realities faced by the Indigenous population as it is about the individual plight of its star, David Gulpilil. People talk about, ‘What is a white director doing making an Indigenous story?’ But I’m not … They’re telling the story, largely, and I’m the mechanism by which they can. — Rolf de Heer1 Few would contest the fact that Rolf de Heer is one of Australia’s most accomplished, noteworthy and distinctive filmmakers. He’s probably the closest thing we have to an auteur. But as D Bruno Starrs points out in…

A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID FIELD David Field has spent a lot of time in jail – ‘More than most crims,’ he says, wryly, ‘and I don’t know why.’ His inexplicably long sentence is our gain, though: Ghosts … of the Civil Dead (John Hillcoat, 1988), Chopper (Andrew Dominik, 2000) and Everynight … Everynight (Alkinos Tsilimidos, 1995) are among the best Australian films, with the last of the three possibly being Field’s finest performance in a career studded with memorable turns. Given his extensive prison-set career, one might assume it was only natural that, once he made the jump to directing, he’d end up back behind bars. However, as Field explains, Convict wasn’t his idea. This one solely comes from George [Basha]. In fact, I didn’t want to do it at…

When raising the subject of Asian cinema on the world-cinema stage and its rise up the critics’ hierarchy, discussion inevitably leans towards South Korea and China. These nations have vibrant, healthy film industries that have produced their share of classic cinema in the last decade, including Still Life (Jia Zhangke, 2006), Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong, 2007), Mother (Bong Joon-ho, 2009) and Black Coal, Thin Ice (Diao Yinan, 2014). But it is perhaps worth examining the works emanating from Cambodia, in particular those by documentarians who have been educated in the West and have used this experience to tell stories about their homeland. Nestled in South-East Asia – with Vietnam to the east, Thailand to the west, and Laos to the north – Cambodia is merely twice the size of Tasmania,…

Texts, at most, are used as stimuli to produce other texts, but once a new text is produced, it cannot be referred to its stimulus. — Umberto Eco1 A thing is what it is, and all comparisons are odious. That said, the idea of cinematic homage, which invites comparison, is nothing new; American director Quentin Tarantino has made a career of it. Within the realm of surf movies, homage is the basis for many films by Jack McCoy, who honours Bud Browne and Bruce Brown, the originators of the form. To celebrate his classic surf movie The Endless Summer (1966), Brown himself collaborated with his son Dana thirty years later in The Endless Summer 2 (Bruce Brown, 1994; Dana wrote the script). Morning of the Earth (Albert Falzon, 1971) may…

Our sense of identity as Australians is, in large part, the product of what nationalistic stories we tell ourselves, but this process of myth-making favours the bushranger, the successful bloke and the battler – leading to a highly masculinised notion of Australianness. Karen Pickering examines the place of women in our biopic canon in light of the forthcoming Julia Gillard telemovie. One of my first encounters with the masculine ideal in the Australian cultural imaginary was our national anthem, which I learned to sing as a child. It began, ‘Australia’s sons let us rejoice, for we are young and free’, and I genuinely believed it was addressing only men. Then we were taught a new beginning – ‘Australians all’ – and it occurs to me now that the 1980s, especially…

Making a Big Difference: The Big Picture Film Festival 2014 JASMINE CRITTENDEN ‘I’ve been covering or programming or organising film festivals for over thirty-five years,’ says Eddie Cockrell, program director of the Big Picture Film Festival, adding: the one thing we know is [that] there’s nothing really new under the sun. But when Rev. Bill Crews came to me with his idea for a social justice film festival, I realised […] here’s something that no-one else is doing. You’ve got human rights festivals, various national festivals, specialty film festivals, and large, international festivals. But I’d never heard of a social justice film festival before. A few years prior, Rev. Crews screened Burmese Dreaming (Timothy Syrota, 2010) at Sydney’s Event Cinemas as a fundraiser for Burma. So many people turned up…

Canberra, and the stretch of land that runs across the Southern Tablelands and into the Southern Highlands just south of Sydney, is an area with exquisitely cinematic light. It is soft and clear, with high skies, glittering in winter and hazy in summer. The aesthetic of Canberra itself, with its stretches of pale, dusty brown bush marked by blocks of concrete, reminds me of the spare scrub and concrete landscapes adored by quintessential modernist director Michelangelo Antonioni. A city planned around the bush and limestone of its original landscape, Australia’s capital is simultaneously contained and wild. Situated in a valley with the Brindabella Ranges hovering on the horizon, it is the perfect setting for a film that explores the close absorption of teenage life. In January 2003, bushfires burning in…

‘We’re all victims of propaganda,’ laments director Anna Broinowski at the conclusion of her documentary Aim High in Creation! (2013). Indeed, the world’s oligarchs – be they CEOs, military dictators, media moguls or gatekeepers of the internet – all have agendas that begin with filtering the truth, the end message reaching the globe’s regular citizens as carefully vetted as a press release. When Broinowski first expressed interest in making a ‘straight’, investigative documentary about plans to begin coal-seam-gas drilling in Sydney Park – a mere stone’s throw from her house in inner-city Erskineville – the filmmaker’s interview requests were denied time and again, until finally she was granted a sit-down with a gas conglomerate’s spokesperson. For the smirking spin doctor, it was less a frank exchange of ideas than a…

Agile and assertive, seventeen-year-old Jîn (Deniz Hasgüler) is a warrior. Vulnerable despite her destructive upbringing, she is also an innocent. Fighting may be her livelihood, with her formative years spent in the thick of a resistance cell rallying through the Turkish–Kurdish conflict, but combat is not the kind of life she desires. When she first graces the frames of Reha Erdem’s 2013 film that bears her name, Jîn is desperate for another existence. Silently and with the stoic exterior that hides her haunted outlook, she slips away, in the cover of night, from the rebels who later come to form her makeshift family. Jîn may be armed with the weaponry of her training, but she remains barely prepared for the harsh realities of her mountain-trekking journey – and for the…

I could see there was a narrative. You go there and see a landscape. You see small people and the big, blue sky. It was posing at me; it was hitting me, as a narrative. It wasn’t for vultures. It was more sensitive, more sensual. I felt like writing a poem again. On 25 May 2009, filmmaker Kamar Ahmad Simon was at home in Dhaka when Cyclone Aila drove a tidal surge over coastal Bangladesh. Graphic images of nearly a million stranded people subsequently filled newspapers. Seven months later, while international leaders floundered at the Copenhagen Summit, Simon hit the road. ‘Being a city dweller, I could read the global voice of climate change – who’s responsible, who’s not responsible, all that buzz,’ he tells me. But at the same…

Recent films about and by Indigenous Australians have enjoyed not only critical acclaim on the film-festival circuit, but also box-office success. Greg Dolgopolov explores the aesthetics, production processes and thematic concerns shared by these films, and evaluates whether their increasing interaction with the mainstream is heralding a ‘new wave’ in Indigenous cinema. I’ve always thought that Indigenous films could cross over into the mainstream and that it was the content that was making them not do that […] Cinema is about entertainment, so I don’t necessarily think [ Bran Nue Dae’s success] is a race thing. — Rachel Perkins1 Over the past few years, Australian Indigenous cinema has been in a period of continual ascendancy, dominating the domestic box office and triumphing at film festivals around the world. Indigenous filmmakers…

I was twenty-one when SBS independent, the commissioning arm of SBS TV, funded me to make my first one-hour documentary, Grandfathers and Revolutions (1999). I was straight out of university and, there and then, I fell in love with the documentary form and the creative freedom that came with it. I became a documentary filmmaker who was passionate about stories of social justice and spent years telling one particular story. Consequently, apart from some short drama work, I had not been interested in doing anything else. Over the following years, my films received recognition – including several international grand prizes for Grandfathers and Revolutions as well as getting on the Academy Award shortlist for my second feature documentary, Inheritance: A Fisherman’s Story (2003). But my documentaries barely paid the bills.…

The protagonist of Andrew Adamson’s Mr Pip (2012), fourteen-year-old Matilda (Xzannjah), lives in 1990s Bougainville, and dreams of growing up and joining her father in Australia. Shot on location in the village of Pidia, the Bougainville scenes are bewitching – luscious greenery, brightly coloured flowers and butterflies, beaches with seemingly unending white sand. We see Bougainvillean kids swinging playfully from palm trees, and watch as the Christian villagers worship in the vibrant chapel. But in this picture-perfect landscape, Matilda’s life and the lives of the villagers are inextricably bound up with the conflicts that copper mining and a civil war bring to their island home. As the opening title cards tell us, ‘The mine sparked a conflict that caused thousands of deaths and saw many fleeing their home forever …’1…

The made-for-TV movie The Outlaw Michael Howe (2013), written and directed by well-known Australian actor Brendan Cowell, is based on the real-life story of the eponymous convictturned-bushranger from nineteenth-century Van Diemen’s Land. But the film is as much about Tasmania’s incredible landscape, which is signalled from the opening scene – a panning shot across a vast forest. Elsewhere, we see grasslands, rugged streams, early-morning mist in the trees, and shifting cloud cover casting the land in alternating pools of light and shadow. The terrain is beautiful, bleak and foreboding. These images perfectly conjure the feeling of being adrift in a harsh, expansive landscape at the edge of the world. This theme of isolation is reinforced by the opening voiceover, with Howe (Damon Herriman) asking in a richly accented voice: ‘Where…

Introduction Sweetie Jane Campion has of course gone on to become internationally renowned with such varied successes as The Piano (1993), The Portrait of a Lady (1996) and Bright Star (2009), so that her first feature film, Sweetie (1989), has tended to be forgotten. Pam Cook’s stimulating and scholarly account of this film, in many ways unique in Australian cinema, goes a long way to repairing this situation. She offers valuable insight into the way the film came together, the kinds of collaboration this involved, and how it made its name as an arthouse production that keeps surprising the viewer with unexpected stylistic and thematic turns. It is interesting to view Sweetie in the light of Campion’s later work; it also merits attention for its own intrinsic qualities,…