Innehållsförteckning för No. 192 från Metro

Australia is a country that, too often, is defined by its cities. While tourism commercials trumpet the Red Centre and our white beaches, much of our scripted screen content focuses on the metropolitan peripheries, showcasing sweeping Sydney Harbour views and art-filled Melbourne laneways. In fiction, journeying outside the coastal capitals is rare and often brief. The ABC’s eight-part comedy Rosehaven, by contrast, is a love letter to regional Australia. The show, set and filmed in rural Tasmania, points the camera solidly at the particularities of life in Australia’s small towns – isolated, insular and reluctant to change. Rosehaven unfolds in the fictitious titular town in southern Tasmania. Daniel (Luke McGregor) has seen his best friend Emma (Celia Pacquola) off on her honeymoon, and left Melbourne for Tasmania’s near-deserted inland. He…

The title of Happy Hour (Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, 2015) is, quite possibly, a joke. Sure, there’s a scene in which the film’s four female friends – nurse Akari (Sachie Tanaka), housewife Sakurako (Hazuki Kikuchi), art-space coordinator Fumi (Maiko Mihara) and soon-to-be-divorcee Jun (Rira Kawamura) – head out, among a larger group, for some early evening drinks in the coastal city of Kobe. But it takes a particularly wry director to title a movie ‘Happy Hour’ – borrowing the English phrase rather than employing a Japanese one – when the movie is 317 minutes long. At such a vast length, Hamaguchi’s feature is an odd bird. There’s a certain festival programming strain – and a hardcore-cinephile audience – for epic films, but Hamaguchi bears no comparison to endurance-cinema titans like Béla Tarr…

At eleven years old, Zachariah Doomadgee wants to be a man, but he doesn’t think he’s quite ready. ‘I don’t even think I’m mature enough,’ the fidgety young boy tells his father, Alec, when learning his ceremony could be just around the corner. Ceremony is a sacred rite of passage for the Gangalidda, Waanyi and Garawa peoples of Far North Queensland, during which boys in their teenage years are initiated into manhood via participation in ancient songlines and rituals to pass on secret knowledge – and it looms large in Zach’s life. It’s easy to see why: his father’s enthusiasm for and trust in the ritual seems unwavering. Alec knows ceremony will give his sons what they need to know who they are, and to become leaders in their community.…

Dogs are certainly having their day in contemporary cinema. In the US, performance artist Laurie Anderson made Heart of a Dog (2015), a meditation on the grief she experienced over losing her beloved and talented canine, Lolabelle. In Switzerland, Jean-Luc Godard attached a small, digital camera to his exuberant dog, Roxy, for Goodbye to Language (2014), an experimental video essay in 3D. Australia weighs into this burgeoning body of work with Baxter and Me (2016), which offers no less than an entire autobiography recounted with reference to the many dogs – with names like Sandy Sox, Wombat, Ajax and Bibster – with whom writer/director Gillian Leahy has shared her life. Leahy even forfeits the star acting credit to this presence she lovingly refers to as a ‘beast’: Billy Baxter Budd,…

Writer/director Stephen Wallace began his career in the 1960s, initially working as a production assistant at Film Australia and, over the period 1969–1970, as an editor at the British Film Institute. He returned to Film Australia in 1971, undertaking various projects, mainly as a screenwriter. Around this time, Wallace came across a small bundle of letters that became the foundation for his first major work: the 50-minute featurette The Love Letters from Teralba Road (1977). As Wallace has explained, the film came from a series of letters that I found [in 1972] in a flat in [the Sydney suburb of] Birchgrove. It was [a] $19 a week flat, basically two rooms, three rooms, and I found these letters in a drawer under newspaper. And I had a quick look at…

SAROO BRIERLEY’S STORY OF CHILDHOOD DISPLACEMENT AND DECADES-LATER RECONNECTION WITH HIS BIRTH MOTHER, AS DRAMATISED IN GARTH DAVIS’ LION, HAS MADE AN IMPACT ON AUDIENCES BOTH HERE AND ABROAD. BY BRAVELY TACKLING THE THEMES OF IDENTITY, BELONGING, PERSPECTIVE, AND BOTH PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL DISTANCE, THE FILM DOES JUSTICE TO THE MAGNITUDE OF A MAN’S SOUL-SEARCHING JOURNEY THAT SPANS ACROSS THE EARTH, WRITES TARA JUDAH. Australia’s landscape is vast, varied and complex; it would be difficult for most viewers to assuredly identify it from its topography alone. In Lion (Garth Davis, 2016), adapted for the screen from Saroo Brierley’s true-life story, A Long Way Home, a camera travels across sublime terrain: through heavy mist, to reveal a forest; trailing the coast, where waves crash against sunny beaches; through iconic rock formations…

Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman (2016) opens with a literal bit of stage-setting. In a series of tight shots, the camera delineates several sections of a theatrical set – bed, table, doorway – that fit together as the performance space for a community production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. The sequence concludes as the key lights are raised to illuminate the space, as though the show were about to begin. The next scene introduces Emad (Shahab Hosseini, who won Best Actor at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival for the role) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) – husband and wife, and the key performers in the Salesman production as Willy and Linda Loman – as they become homeless, their comfortable apartment building having had its foundations undermined by construction work adjacent…

The Hong Kong film industry has changed a great deal over the span of Three (2016) director Johnnie To’s career. Shifting from television to feature film in the industry’s commercial heyday of the 1980s, To’s output has remained remarkably consistent, not to mention prolific, during a period in which many of his contemporaries took the journey west to Hollywood and back again, returning to a diminished Hong Kong industry. At the same time, the mainland Chinese industry has expanded rapidly, with its voracious demand for blockbusters, historical epics and fantasy films. Indeed, To joined with two such peers, Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam, as co-directors and co–executive producers on the Hong Kong – Chinese action co-production Triangle (2007), which also featured Three star Louis Koo. While Triangle represented something of…

Lynette Wallworth’s Collisions (2016) may be the first time a film has made me feel impolite. This wasn’t impoliteness in the mundane, real-world sense of recognising some gauche behaviour of mine that annoyed fellow cinema-goers (no doubt a common occurrence), nor in the sense of an empathetic connection with an uncouth character on screen (as in the continuing popularity of painfully awkward character interactions). Collisions, the film itself, made me feel personally impolite: a vague, nagging feeling that lingered, even if only for a minute or two. What caused this sentiment was partly the technology used to tell the story: Collisions is a pioneering work in virtual reality (VR) filmmaking, Wallworth an Australian artist experienced with technology-based installation works. This VR short film (if that’s the right term for it)…

Two sets of questions surface in Screen Australia’s Screen Currency: Valuing Our Screen Industry,1 a major report that condenses the findings of two studies conducted by Deloitte Access Economics and by Olsberg SPI, and was released in November 2016 at Screen Producers Australia’s annual Screen Forever conference. The first is explicit: what is the worth of Australia’s screen industry, encompassing film, television and online content? The second is less immediately obvious, but perhaps more crucial to the industry’s survival: exactly how do we value Australia’s storytelling industry, what does it contribute to the texture of Australian culture and society, and how is it valued beyond its economic worth? These two notions of value – economic and measurable, and cultural but unquantifiable – are at the heart of both the report…

Screen adaptations of esteemed novels are commonly beset by tensions. Audiences familiar with the original narrative will naturally use it to evaluate the cinematic rendering, and often find that the film falls short of the source text. This is also informed by the prevailing tendency for literary works to be more highly regarded than film; in the hierarchy of artforms, many consider literature as eclipsing cinema in terms of bearing greater cultural and intellectual ‘value’. As adaptation theorist Linda Hutcheon points out, ‘disparaging opinions on adaptation as a secondary mode – belated and therefore derivative – persist’.1 This propensity to see screen adaptations as inferior is far from new. In fact, it still chimes with the viewpoint of pioneering British novelist Virginia Woolf, who ‘deplored the simplification of the literary…

When the elderly Yoshiko Shinoda (Kirin Kiki) speaks of her recently deceased husband of fifty years, she voices her opinions without any trace of nostalgia or sugar-coating. When she talks of her adult son, Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) – and to him, in fact – she adopts the same matter-of-fact, no-nonsense manner. Yoshiko isn’t the only woman to discuss the once-promising novelist, now-struggling private detective in such plain terms, or to remain cognisant of his flaws. His sister, Chinatsu (Satomi Kobayashi), leaves him notes in places where she knows he’ll try to pilfer money for his gambling habit, and reprimands him for giving their mother cash while borrowing, stealing and pawning wherever and whatever he can. His estranged wife, Kyoko Shirashi (Yōko Maki), also clearly sees his many issues as she…

Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016), co-written and directed by Anurag Kashyap, received nominations for Best Director, Best Cinematographer (Jay Oza) and Best Actor (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) at the 2016 Asia Pacific Screen Awards. Earlier that year, it was the third of Kashyap’s films to be featured in the Directors’ Fortnight program at Cannes, and was nominated for Best Film at the Sydney Film Festival. Like most of Kashyap’s work, Raman Raghav 2.0 is based on real events. Raman Raghav was a serial killer from Mumbai who, in the 1960s, bludgeoned victims to death, often as they slept on the pavement. He confessed to having murdered over forty people, was diagnosed as mentally ill and was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment.1 Kashyap has been invested in the story since the mid 1990s, after…

Representation is a concept that has gained increasing currency in recent years. More and more, consumers and critics of popular media are recognising that the positive, nuanced visibility of historically marginalised groups in the stories we tell ourselves enhances compassion for, and the dignity of, those groups. Typically, the conversation has revolved around race. In Australia, we have seen discussion around the under- or misrepresentation of, say, Lebanese- and Chinese-Australians in mainstream programming,1 while shows like The Circuit and Redfern Now have helped bring the lives of remote and urban Indigenous communities, respectively, into the spotlight, after many years of neglect. Increasingly, the debate has included gender and sexually diverse communities, too. In the US, media advocacy group GLAAD celebrated the highest rates of LGBTQ representation on US television since…

SAVE AND QUIT: FAREWELLING GOOD GAME Daniel Golding It was a surprise to everyone when the ABC cancelled Good Game in February. The show had been a powerhouse of demographic dominance, and one of the key pieces in the ABC youth-market puzzle. Kids loved it, young adults loved it, and, for the most part, many adults interested in videogames loved it. It had a strong online presence – word has it that iview’s youth programming relies strongly on the children’s version of the show, Good Game: Spawn Point (which will continue production) – and several YouTube channels with a total of more than seven million views. The Australian videogames industry by and large adored it, with creator and executive producer Janet Carr recently named a Pillar of the Industry by…