Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 208 i Metro

Based on the true story of Sam Bloom’s life-changing injury and psychological recovery with the aid of her family’s pet magpie, Penguin Bloom eschews aesthetic or narrative overcomplication in its translation to screen. Speaking with director Glendyn Ivin, Jasmine Crittenden discusses a filmmaking process in which the unpredictability of working with children and animals was embraced – and a film in which personal relationships, be they human or bird, take centre stage. For years before making Penguin Bloom (2020), director Glendyn Ivin had wanted to make a film about animals. ‘When I was a kid, I loved films with animals in them – and it’s stuck with me ever since,’ he says. Storm Boy [Henri Safran, 1976] has always been a touchstone for me. I saw it at the cinema…

Australian cinema has a long history of outlaw heroes, and this independent feature – about the friendship that develops between a teenage criminal on the run and the terminally ill girl he kidnaps – fits squarely within that tradition. But while the film has much to recommend it in terms of its acting and visual language, its jarring tonal shifts and insistence on downplaying its protagonist’s criminality make it a distinctly uneven experience, argues Thomas Redwood. It tells us something about Australian identity that so many of our favourite cultural heroes are outlaws: thieves, bandits, cop killers. Our mythology is littered with violent rebels who take up arms against law and order. From Ned Kelly to Mark ‘Chopper’ Read, the criminal has long been a figure of national adoration.1 Perhaps…

New Zealand hip-hop label Dawn Raid Entertainment has been a trailblazer since its launch in 1999, bringing a distinctly Polynesian sensibility to a traditionally African-American artform – a journey chronicled in Oscar Kightley’s new documentary. At a time when questions of race and identity are at the forefront of conversation, the film offers a fascinating insight into US cultural influence abroad, the local and universal struggles of disadvantaged minorities, and the art that emerges from these intersections, as CJ Johnson investigates. The first words we hear in Dawn Raid (2021), Oscar Kightley’s enormously entertaining feature-length documentary about the rise, fall and rebirth of Dawn Raid Entertainment – New Zealand’s first and, by far, most influential hip-hop label – are American. ‘Yo, yo, yo,’ says an identifiably African-American voice on an…

Last year’s most acclaimed Australian TV series has also been a target for criticism over its foregrounding of white characters in a story that’s ostensibly about Australia’s racialised refugee policies. But while such choices reflect much broader structural issues within the screen industry, Dave Crewe argues that the show’s missteps go deeper than just casting decisions. The night of 30 November 2020 should have been one of unadulterated celebration for Elise McCredie, co-creator of miniseries Stateless. Her show had just picked up an impressive thirteen AACTA Awards, including Best Telefeature or Mini Series and all four television-drama acting awards. But her comments in an ABC News article the day after betray more than a hint of defensiveness: We wouldn’t have been able to get [the series] financed, unfortunately, unless we…

A FEEL-GOOD UNDERDOG STORY SET IN THE WORLD OF COMPETITIVE PAPER PLANE FLYING, ROBERT CONNOLLY’S 2014 FILM BEGINS IN THE PLACE WHERE ITS PREMISE HAS THE MOST USEFUL REAL-WORLD APPLICATION: THE CLASSROOM. AS DAVE CREWE OUTLINES, THE FILM PROVIDES PLENTIFUL OPPORTUNITIES FOR LEARNING ABOUT THE BASICS OF AERODYNAMICS, AS WELL AS THE VALUE OF AN EDUCATIONAL MINDSET IN WHICH FAILURE AND SETBACKS ARE EMBRACED. Remember Paper Planes (Robert Connolly, 2014)? Probably not, I suspect; the film is the kind of crowd-pleasing pablum made to be forgotten. An archetypal underdog sports film – where the ‘sport’ in question is the construction of paper planes – it leans heavily on clichés and the charm of its young star, Ed Oxenbould, to carry its paper-thin narrative. But while I can’t really recommend Paper…

In 2010, as the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was congratulating itself for finally anointing a woman, Kathryn Bigelow, as Best Director, its Australian counterpart had already bestowed its equivalent award on no fewer than eight female filmmakers. Starting with Gillian Armstrong’s success in 1979, subsequent AFI (later AACTA) awards for Best Director had been presented to Nadia Tass, Jocelyn Moorhouse, Jane Campion, Sue Brooks, Sarah Watt, Elissa Down and – at that time, most recently – Cate Shortland for her debut film, Somersault (2004).1 Yet this statistic – incredible in contrast – presents nothing like the complete picture of women in Australian film, which has always been complex and fraught with challenges. As lazy and redundant as it is to distil such diverse and idiosyncratic works…

Inspired by the long-overlooked history of the cameleers who journeyed from Afghanistan and beyond to haul supplies across the late-nineteenth-century Australian outback, Roderick MacKay’s debut feature paints a complicated portrait of the country’s colonial past. In its tale of ill-gotten gold, racial animus and displacement, the film is a thematically unique – if, in other respects, somewhat conventional – instalment in a new wave of Australian westerns, writes Jessica Kiang. Over the long and storied history of the movie western, there have been hundreds of night-time campfire scenes. Usually signalling a lull in the linear action of the narrative, these moments are rarely the most emblematic of the films they’re in and – with the possible exception of Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974) – rarely the most immediately remembered. And…

Seth Larney’s indie sci-fi feature debut depicts a world in which oxygen is a limited commodity and the world is ravaged by the effects of anthropogenic climate change. But while its ultimately hopeful ecological message is laudable, Bronwyn Lovell finds that the film’s depiction of women – and gender roles in the world of the future – remains captive to the limited perspective of the science fiction genre’s male-dominated past. Seth Larney’s 2020 science fiction thriller 2067 begins amid what might be the climax of another film: in the last city on Earth, a nuclear explosion is imminent, and mere seconds remain to prevent catastrophe. And yet, the characters are not alarmed. In this apocalyptic near-future vision of a time when Earth’s plant life is extinct and synthetic oxygen has…

Tracing the spectacular rise of Sydney-based Bangarra Dance Theatre from a young and hungry independent company driven by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander creatives to becoming one of Australia’s most treasured performing-arts outfits, Wayne Blair and Nel Minchin’s powerful documentary compels. Stephen A Russell speaks to Minchin about the triumphs and the tragedies that underpin the group’s monumental achievements. Listen to Bangarra Dance Theatre’s artistic director, Stephen Page, speak about the First Nations–led company he has led for thirty years, and it’s clear the fire still burns inside him. It’s all in the name, really. Bangarra is the Wiradjuri word meaning ‘to make fire’. That light radiating from Stephen captivated documentary filmmaker Nel Minchin when she saw him speak about his mesmeric dance film Spear (2015) at a Sydney Theatre…

Country-music icon Slim Dusty takes centre stage alongside Joy McKean, his wife and lifelong artistic collaborator, in Kriv Stenders’ affectionate documentary portrayal of the couple and their work. Packed with songs and archival material, the film is a timely reminder of the place the pair’s oeuvre holds in Australian culture – though its reverent approach and lack of tension may ultimately limit the documentary’s appeal beyond the artists’ existing admirers, as Barnaby Smith discusses. Within the first few minutes of Kriv Stenders’ Slim & I (2020), the Australian singer/songwriter Missy Higgins recalls the first time she was exposed to the music of Slim Dusty, which she describes as ‘the most Australian sound I’d ever heard’. Anyone with even a passing awareness of the country singer she’s referring to will surely…

DEPARTING FROM THE DISTINCTIVE VISUAL STYLE THAT MADE THE COMPANY FAMOUS, STUDIO GHIBLI’S FIRST 3D-ANIMATED FEATURE FILM – DIRECTED BY GOR ō MIYAZAKI AND ADAPTED FROM A BOOK BY DIANA WYNNE JONES – NONETHELESS CARRIES ON THE SENSIBILITIES OF PREVIOUS WORKS: MAGIC-FILLED SETTINGS, DETERMINED CHILD CHARACTERS AND SYMPATHETIC ANTAGONISTS. AS ANTHONY CAREW WRITES, THE JOURNEY OF THE FILM’S ORPHANAGE-RAISED PROTAGONIST FROM SERVITUDE TO MUSIC-INSPIRED SELF-DISCOVERY IS A CLASSIC TALE OF LIBERATION. In the closing credits of Earwig and the Witch (Gorō Miyakazi, 2020), the twenty-third feature from Studio Ghibli connects with the legendary Japanese animation studio’s past. It features a host of stills, painted in watercolour, that show future adventures: a kind of credit-roll postscript that functions as a what-happened-next epilogue. It’s a direct homage to the credits of the classic My Neighbour…

Were we to shoot in America, it would emerge as a half-assed Western, with bars instead of pubs, cowboys instead of sheep drovers – they move differently, walk and react differently. Unlike in the Old West, no one carried guns in the outback. How could we reproduce the Aussie outlook on American locations? — Fred Zinnemann1 When the renowned Hollywood director Fred Zinnemann came to Australia to make The Sundowners (1960), it was no part of his intention to stimulate the then-moribund state of the Australian film industry. His film was an Anglo-American production for Warner Bros.; it featured Hollywood stars (Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum) in the leading roles; and its technical team was mainly British, headed by top cameraman Jack Hildyard, who had recently won an Oscar for…

A faithful and efficient adaptation of the popular crime novel by Jane Harper, Robert Connolly’s film was the local cinematic success story of early 2021. But considered in the context of recent Australian genre works that have capably straddled the increasingly blurred divide between big and small screen, the film is disappointingly lacking in some essential cinematic qualities, Mel Campbell argues. Jane Harper’s debut novel The Dry was optioned for the screen before it was even published.1 Set in the fictional drought-stricken rural community of Kiewarra, where the sun beats down relentlessly on buried secrets, the novel tells a gripping mystery story that foregrounds mood and setting in a way that reads like a screen treatment. But would it be a big- or small-screen story? The obvious choice would have…

In a screen industry that largely shuns big-budget genre films, Luke Sparke’s science fiction sequel is a rarity: an Australian production that attempts to follow the path of the Hollywood action blockbusters that dominate the box office. As David Michael Brown contends, the film’s special effects and set pieces are nothing to sneeze at, but eliciting enthusiasm from local audiences remains a significant challenge. No-one could have predicted that the tumultuous year that was 2020 would lead to Australia becoming a major hub of Hollywood production. With the US in turmoil due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the major studios have looked further afield to safer pastures. The result? Australia’s film studios have never been busier. Tom Hanks is headlining Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis Presley biopic on the Gold…

Against a backdrop of declining animal populations and out-of-control climate change, Kathy Drayton’s documentary chronicles the journey of the director’s child from secondary school to a successful music career in young adulthood – in doing so, giving voice to the next generation’s anxieties and lack of hope for the future. Training its focus squarely on the psychological impact of the crisis, The Weather Diaries is decidedly not in the business of offering solutions or preaching to the unconverted, Travis Johnson writes. Broadly speaking, documentaries about the climate crisis take a macro view – global, wide-spanning, invoking horrifying imagery that wouldn’t be out of place in a Roland Emmerich film. Even the more benign and hopeful examples of the subgenre truck in spectacle: consider the stunning vistas and daringly captured wildlife…

The follow-up to his acclaimed debut Ilo Ilo, Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen’s second feature reflects many of the same thematic concerns about family relationships, domestic responsibility, and the gulf between his homeland’s self-representation and less glamorous on-the-ground realities. As Kenta McGrath contends, however, Wet Season’s comparatively rigid aesthetic and often heavy-handed symbolism come at the expense of the realism that flows through the earlier work. Critics sometimes place patronising expectations on a director’s second film, especially if the director happens to be young and to have gained some level of success with their first effort. Even the word ‘sophomore’ – commonly used in the United States to describe a second-year high school or college student, but also more broadly to denote the second work of an artist – comes from…

DRAMATISING THE THRILLS AND ANXIETIES OF A TRANSGENDER GIRL STARTING AFRESH IN SECONDARY SCHOOL, JULIE KALCEFF’S FOUR-PART CHILDREN’S SERIES FIRST DAY TREATS ITS PROTAGONIST’S IDENTITY MATTER-OF-FACTLY WHILE TACKLING COMPLEX SUBJECT MATTER – WHETHER IT BE INSTITUTIONAL DISCRIMINATION, TRANSPHOBIC BULLYING OR PRE-TEEN BODY-IMAGE ISSUES – HEAD-ON. BEYOND ITS ACCESSIBLE NARRATIVE, THE SHOW ALSO SERVES AS A USEFUL TEXT FOR DISCUSSING TOPICS SUCH AS THE IMPORTANCE OF DIVERSE SCREEN REPRESENTATION AND THE BENEFITS OF INTERGROUP CONTACT, AS STEVEN AOUN DESCRIBES. The idea of representation has long been a rallying cry for cultural diversity, equity and inclusion. Appeals for increased space for the marginalised, displaced and excluded can be increasingly heard across a range of fields, ranging from the classroom1 to the workplace,2 via the body politic3 and embodied lifeworld experiences.4 This is…

Among John Duigan’s prolific credits as director and writer, Flirting has not received the critical attention it deserves. Such diverse pieces as 1978’s Mouth to Mouth and 1987’s The Year My Voice Broke have been quite widely discussed for their places in the Australian cinema of their respective decades; but Flirting, which shares the latter film’s protagonist, teenager Danny Embling, is equally worthy of consideration. Danica van de Velde’s lively, perceptive and thoroughly researched account rightly places the film in significant cultural and production contexts and creates a need for its revisitation and reappraisal. This being his last issue in the role, all of us at Metro would like to thank Brian McFarlane for his integral contribution in helming our NFSA Restores series since its genesis in 2007 (as The…