Innehållsförteckning för No. 187 från Metro

It used to be that creating for online was a last resort for projects that failed to secure funding, or the medium where the weird went to be seen by an anonymous, murky few. But, as online spaces are legitimised, and as virality offers rewards financially and in terms of professional credibility, the web series has become a genre in its own right – one that big names want in on, à la Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis, Web Therapy (starring Lisa Kudrow, Lily Tomlin and Minnie Driver) and the online musical Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog by Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon. With the successes of web-to-TV series like Broad City, Burning Love and Drunk History in the US, online has proven itself a viable launching pad…

Villa Touma tells the story of a young woman who is orphaned by circumstance and torn between her desire for freedom and the retrograde severity of her adoptive aunts. In many ways, this story is also the story of the film itself, with a funding dispute at the 2014 Venice Film Festival leaving it ‘orphaned’. Writer/director Suha Arraf – screenwriter of Eran Riklis’ The Syrian Bride (2004) and The Lemon Tree (2008) – entered her fiction debut into competition as Palestinian. Logical enough; as Arraf herself has said, ‘The story is Palestinian, the actresses are Palestinian, it takes place in Palestine.’1 But the Israeli organisations that had provided the bulk of Villa Touma’s funding – the Ministry of Culture and Sport’s Israeli Film Fund, the Ministry of Economy’s Small Business…

‘We tend to see refugees as a homogenous, uniform group who’ve all gone through a similar process. But, actually, everybody’s experience is different,’ says filmmaker Steve Thomas. In his latest documentary, Freedom Stories (2015), Thomas captures the stories of twelve refugees, all of whom have lived in Australia for a decade or longer. His subjects have a common history: they fled their homelands by boat and endured indefinite mandatory detention before being granted asylum. Now, they are Australian citizens, working, studying, raising families and joining communities. However, despite their seemingly similar experiences, their stories are unique – and, through his film, Thomas provides an avenue for their telling. He explains: I didn’t want to replace one set of stereotypes with another […] I wanted to allow the participants to tell…

There’s a long American tradition of outsiders being the most acute commentators on the Land of the Free. Guy Rundle’s series of dispatches for Crikey about the election season of 2008 was the funniest and most insightful report about how it felt to be an American voter that year. Jon Ronson’s 2004 book The Men Who Stare at Goats was simultaneously absurd and terrifying as it examined the US military’s quest to train a corps of Jedi warriors, with Ronson’s polite bafflement being somehow more scathing than a traditional exposé. But it’s the outsiders that come to Hollywood that have most consistently challenged the way America sees itself as a nation – from the gleeful challenges to morality by the likes of Paul Verhoeven, Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger, to…

First aired in 2012, the ABC’s Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries – whose third season premiered in May last year – has set a new benchmark for locally produced period drama. The show has been a phenomenal success, selling to more than 120 territories internationally including the UK, the US, France, Canada, Sweden and Germany. Its first two seasons averaged well over a million views per episode, with Season 2 nudging 2 million,1 and were recognised at the Logies and AACTAs. The show has also been praised for its feminist representations,2 and a film adaptation, which picks up where Season 3 left off, is to be ‘shot in England and set in a variety of exotic locations around the world’.3 Yet Miss Fisher is unflinchingly Australian. Combining historic locations from across…

A melancholy examination of love and family across the span of decades and oceans, Mountains May Depart (2015), the latest narrative feature from Chinese auteur Jia Zhang-Ke, would register as thematically heavy-handed if it weren’t, rather, cheerfully blunt. As with his previous feature, A Touch of Sin (2013), Jia is clearly on a mission to develop fresh means of expression to make sense of China’s rapid economic and social development over the past few decades. The earlier film took its cues from the wuxia genre, depicting a sequence of short episodes in which put-upon, lower-tier Chinese workers react against the pressures of rising economic disparity through sudden outbursts of violence. In Mountains, Jia portrays a love triangle and its attenuated aftermath across three discrete episodes and time periods: 1999, 2014,…

Originally censored upon its release, Aussie ‘sexploitation’ drama The Set (Frank Brittain, 1970) – about young, homosexual, aspiring set designer Paul Lawrence, who embarks on a relationship with a bisexual member of Sydney’s upper-class society – is the ‘first Australian feature with homosexuality as a central theme’.1 It quickly gained infamy for its taboo-for-the-times, non-judgemental exploration of homosexuality and on-screen nudity featuring popular television star Hazel Phillips. I speak to Sean Myers (nee McEuan), who played Paul, as well as veteran actor and The Set screenwriter Roger Ward about the film’s notorious source material, their creative struggles with the subsequent film adaptation, and their plans to finally do justice to a story originally penned over forty-five years ago. Oliver Pfeiffer: Homosexuality was taboo in the 1970s. What was the driving…

On 8 April 1811, the ship Friends sailed from England carrying 101 female convicts bound for the penal colony of New South Wales. Their crimes ranged from pickpocketing to murder, but most of them had been convicted of theft. Susannah Noon, not yet in her teens, had tried to steal four pairs of cotton stockings, worth ten shillings, from a shop in Colchester. It earned her a sentence of transportation for seven years ‘beyond the seas’. It was a sentence that reverberated throughout her lifetime; she never returned to England. Instead Susannah and her shipmates found themselves living in a new land as members of a new and unique society. Their only shackles were the vast ocean and their fear of the unknown. In 1811 there were only 100 women…

Myrtle ‘Tilly’ Dunnage (played by Oscar winner Kate Winslet) steps off the bus at dawn, wielding her Singer sewing machine like a cowboy would a gun. As the spaghetti western–inspired soundtrack jangles, Tilly parts her perfect rouge lips, exhales cigarette smoke and surveys the home town from which she was exiled in disgrace as a ten-year-old. ‘I’m back, you bastards,’ she utters, sending an icy chill over the golden plains and sleeping townsfolk of Dungatar. The Dressmaker (2015) means business right from its opening sequence. Winslet cuts an undoubtedly striking figure against the quiet, dusty Australian backdrop; a Hollywood icon, she undeniably brings an elegant poise to the role of Tilly insofar as it’s easy, on face value, to mistake The Dressmaker for an international production. But don’t let its…

One of the things that people don’t realize about Dad’s kind of music is, when you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful. —Spike Jones Jr1 Surrealism was one of the major artistic movements of the twentieth century, its influence making an impact on creative arts of all forms. Arising largely from the Dada movement, its goal, in the words of one of its key founders, the poet André Breton, was to resolve ‘these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory’ by adopting an artistic language born of [p]sychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning…

On the streets of Tehran, renowned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi sits in a taxi with his pre-teen niece, Hana Saeidi. Their topic of conversation is appropriate film content, or what Iran’s government deems screenable. Tasked with a school assignment to make a short film, Saeidi has been advised to avoid depicting sordid reality, and discusses the concept with her famous uncle. Of course, as both Panahi and the watching audience are aware, the writer/director is more than familiar with the restrictions imposed by the state on the nation’s movie industry, having been banned from filmmaking for twenty years after prolonged controversy over his features.1 Elsewhere in the Iranian capital city, a cameraperson films a van filled with a sample of the country’s working class. The men in front of his…

Li Wen at East Lake (2015) is the latest genre-defying effort from Chinese-born Canadian director Luo Li; the film cements him as a significant voice in world cinema, with a film style that can only be described as his own. Working within an experimental framework that blends documentary and fictional elements, the film explores issues of helplessness and hopelessness in contemporary China. Luo Li’s cinema is sparse and fragmented, with an eye for the sublime – a world where narrative threads are spontaneously constructed and disassembled. Taken cumulatively, however, the message is that of political rebellion. The film is set around the eponymous East Lake, a natural wonder and significant landmark in the sprawling city of Wuhan. Also Luo Li’s home town, Wuhan appears to be a continuing source of…

It ought to be impossible to think of the Australian rock music scene and not bring up the films of Richard Lowenstein. The director, born and raised in Melbourne, has one of the more genre-diverse careers of any local filmmaker. His films have rarely assimilated with the popular trends of the day, and he has devoted his career to being a part of – and subsequently chronicling – some of the biggest and most influential names in Australian music. Ecco Homo (2015), co-directed by Lowenstein and long-time collaborator Lynn-Maree Milburn, completes an unofficial trilogy of documentaries about Melbourne’s then-burgeoning post-punk scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the unique personalities who figured prominently throughout it. Following his films We’re Livin’ on Dog Food (2009) and Autoluminescent: Rowland S.…

This is a film that was critically well regarded at the time of its release in 1981, but which has perhaps since slipped away somewhat in the public memory. Keith Beattie’s essay offers serious grounds for its reconsideration. In sociocultural terms, it was an important film in its dealings with Indigenous Australians, particularly in relation to its treatment of black musicians and the challenge they offered to white Australia. In this respect, Beattie’s study reminds us of film’s power to shock. He also deals insightfully with the film’s generic hybridism: it is part rockumentary, part road movie, part significant social drama. Wrong Side of the Road is a work that should be brought to the attention of a later generation of Australian filmgoers. Brian McFarlane, Series Editor On its release…