Innehållsförteckning för No. 194 från Metro

Has any other matter received such persistent and disturbing attention in media reportage these days as the sexual abuse of children in schools, most commonly boarding schools? Two equally repulsive aspects of this phenomenon are the lasting emotional and psychological scarring that seems to become the lot of the victims as well as the urge of the institutions at fault to cover up offences in order to preserve their public image. Now we have an admirable Australian film that takes on this difficult subject. Based on a real-life case, Tori Garrett’s feature debut, Don’t Tell (2017), takes a serious theme and treats it with impressive intelligence and fair-mindedness. This is a film that deserves much more attention than it seems to have received. And I don’t want to make this…

There comes a time in many, if not all, twentysomethings’ lives when you realise that perhaps the vision you had for your life isn’t quite how things will actually pan out. In That’s Not Me (2017), lead character Polly (played by co-writer Alice Foulcher) lives that out in a warped – and often humiliating – semi-public eye as the identical twin sister of a famous actress. It’s one thing to live your life with such widespread scrutiny while coming to terms with your identity in your twenties. But it’s a whole other thing to live it out in a purgatory of semi-obscurity, faced with the exact image of what-could-have-been plastered all around town and permeating every aspect of your life – right down to your parents’ indifference to your suffering…

 Food has been a key way through which ethnic minorities have established a public platform for themselves, elevated their voices and morphed into household names in Australia and abroad. Chef Poh Ling Yeow, who is of Chinese-Malaysian descent, shot to stardom in 2009 after she finished as runner-up of the first season of MasterChef Australia. Following this achievement, she landed an ABC cooking show, Poh’s Kitchen, and published an eventual bestseller, Poh’s Kitchen: My Cooking Adventures. Chef Adam Liaw, of Chinese-Malaysian and English heritage, went one step further and won MasterChef Australia’s second season in 2010, after which he released several cookbooks and began hosting his own show on SBS, Destination Flavour. Vietnamese-Australian chef and restaurateur Luke Nguyen is well known as the host of TV shows Luke Nguyen’s Vietnam…

One of the most compelling shifts in popular film discourse in the digital age has been the onus placed on accuracy. A factual or historical film is now subject to a content-churning rigour – though it’s highly unlikely you’ll soon see the headline ‘What By the Time It Gets Dark Gets Wrong About the 1976 Thammasat University Massacre’ ripple across your social media timelines. Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong’s second feature, which premiered at the 2016 Locarno Film Festival, functions almost as a rebuke to its own historicity. It captures a dreamlike, free-associative mood in response to the memory, rather than the actuality, of an event that saw forty-six students killed, 167 wounded and more than 3000 arrested.1 These numbers themselves represent some degree of conflict, with survivors of the massacre…

Going beyond the famed cuisine of the American South, Matthew Salleh’s documentary takes viewers on a journey to twelve different countries and delves into the various cooking methods and contexts of barbecuing. With its robust scope and style, the film also surveys the tradition’s deeper significance – as a conduit for identity, time and togetherness – for the members of each culture, writes Sam van Zweden. ‘I’ve found that fire, when you really think about it, is something that brings people together.’ These are the opening words of the sprawling, ambitious documentary Barbecue, directed by Matthew Salleh and co-produced by Rose Tucker (who collaboratively make up Urtext Films), which premiered earlier this year at SXSW. Framing barbecue as social and cultural glue, the film acts as a timely reminder to…

‘I thought the film would be about how Super PACs work, and how they’ve affected modern American politics – which it still is, to a certain extent. But what I realised we had, after a couple of months, was the backstory behind why Carson was running.’ LUKE WALKER Originally intending to chronicle the journey of American presidential candidate Ben Carson, writer/director Luke Walker instead found himself capturing the complexities of US electoral fundraising. Elizabeth Flux speaks to him about the six months he spent observing the machinery of the 2016 campaign, the rise and fall of a political figure, and how these shaped his resulting film, PACmen. During the 2016 American presidential race, Ben Carson was the no-name underdog who looked, for the briefest of moments, as though he was going…

‘All the world’s a stage’ is one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines, even more relevant in social-media-mediated twenty-first century life than it was when he wrote it in 1599. Yet, if that maxim has been so often repeated as to seem hackneyed, New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton audaciously reclaimed its resonance with her debut novel, 2008’s The Rehearsal. Written, as her Master’s thesis, when she was just twenty-one,1 it’s about students at a drama school who are put through their paces, and contains ‘post-structuralist ideas’ that she sought to apply to the adolescent female experience.2 What resulted was a work in which chronology is jumbled; plotlines bleed into one another; and ‘performance’ and ‘reality’ are deliberately confused, stage directions and theatrical effects employed even when stories aren’t playing out in…

The ABC’s high-concept genre series Glitch is a decidedly ‘Australian’ take on an international trend of shows about resurrection. First broadcast throughout July and August 2015, the show was created by industry mainstays Louise Fox and Tony Ayres, and centres on a small town in rural Australia where the dead are coming back to life. But Glitch is less horror series than a piece of magic realism, presenting itself as a realist Australian drama that has been invaded – or perhaps infected – by genre TV. Through this communion between social realism and genre, Glitch attempts to disturb the concept that there is a singular vision of ‘Australia’ – a notion that has been uncritically repeated in local, Eurocentric storytelling since the conception of Terra Australis Incognita. Glitch follows police…

Okja’s an almost-family-film that, ultimately, talks about industrialised agribusiness, the peddling of genetically modified organisms, and ecoterrorism, while also taking terrifying trips into the forced insemination and mass slaughter of factory animals. ‘With my films,’ boasts Bong Joon-ho, ‘sometimes people don’t know whether to laugh or whether it’s a serious scene, and they’ll ask me: “Was it supposed to be funny?”’1 Across six feature films – from 2000’s low-budget black comedy Barking Dogs Never Bite to 2017’s big-budget capitalist parable Okja – the Korean director has fashioned less a distinctive style, more a singular tone. Or, more to the point, a tonal plurality. Whether a monster movie (2006’s The Host), a serial-killer procedural (2003’s Memories Of Murder) or a post-apocalyptic action spectacle (2013’s Snowpiercer), each Bong film is at once…

As Rosa Reyes (Jaclyn Jose) surveys the world around her, little about it pleases the eye. Nor should it – she lives, poverty-stricken, in a shantytown in Mandaluyong, east of the Philippine capital of Manila, her surroundings proving a bleak yet busy ecosystem of hardship where aesthetics are the furthest thing from anyone’s mind. Her community is driven by practicality; surviving is their primary aim. Anything else is immaterial, even the promise of a different future that comes from an advertisement on the side of a bus that heralds, ‘It’s your lucky day.’ The irony provoked by the ad’s glossy message doesn’t escape attention in Brillante Mendoza’s Ma’ Rosa (2016) – standing out against the slums, the promotional slogan peddles insincere hope in a place where such throwaway dreams mean…

Ostensibly a film about director Robert Nugent’s hunt for a long-thought-lost species of bird, Night Parrot Stories is, more significantly, a meditation on historical and scientific constructions, the clash of white and Aboriginal cultures, and humanity’s place in – and continued destruction of – nature. Lauren Carroll Harris dives into this intricately woven documentary and dissects its manifold messages. What makes a documentary today? What do we expect documentaries to do? Night Parrot Stories (2016) is a film about director Robert Nugent’s search for ‘that bird lost in the darkness’.1 Despite its call being heard across the desert after dark, the night parrot is a mysterious Australian bird that had evaded human contact for around eighty years until a 1979 sighting; in the late 1800s, it was hunted by European…

George Miller’s The Man from Snowy River (1982) is, by many measures, one of the most successful Australian films of all time. Widely loved and hugely profitable, the film drew on the deftness of Australian television drama to help reorient Australian filmmaking towards a popular and international audience. Yet The Man from Snowy River also has a complicated and contested legacy: too gauche for cinephiles and too glossy a portrait of Australia for progressive audiences, it was critically flayed upon release and has received far less attention over time than its contemporaries Gallipoli (Peter Weir, 1981) and Breaker Morant (Bruce Beresford, 1980). It is a film that lives in the space of a certain kind of national iconography: as Tom O’Regan puts it, The Man from Snowy River is from…

Why didn’t she just leave? they might ask. Didn’t she know better? We all like to imagine that, if we found ourselves in the sorts of physically or emotionally violent situations that we hear about on the news and see in the movies, we would be strong enough to extricate ourselves. That we are smart enough to not be hoodwinked in the first place, or have the strength to leave, or have the power to escape. But, as we saw in this year’s much-talked-about HBO miniseries Big Little Lies, which courted media attention and controversy for its depiction of domestic violence, it is rarely that simple. In these situations, there are often dozens of unknowable answers to unaskable questions. To interrogate why somebody, say, doesn’t just walk away from an…

Dance Academy, which ran for three seasons on the ABC from 2010 to 2013, is one of Australia’s most successful cultural exports in recent years. The television series, produced by Werner Film Productions, has aired in around 180 territories,1 attracted a substantial fan base worldwide, and received both local and international critical acclaim. Thanks to this success, Dance Academy has made the rare leap onto the big screen: released in Australia in April this year, Dance Academy: The Movie (Jeffrey Walker) stands as the storyline’s epic conclusion, tying up the loose ends left by the series. The feature is also a test of the show’s enduring global appeal, as well as of its lasting impact on Australia’s screen industries. The series follows ambitious young dancer Tara Webster (Xenia Goodwin) after…

There is a coldness to the vision of Melbourne presented in Seven Types of Ambiguity, the six-part ABC adaptation of Elliot Perlman’s novel of the same name. Director of photography Bonnie Elliott lets us reach into different parts of the city – from the high office buildings looking out over greenery, to the brightly coloured lights of brothels. Characters walk through the crisp air along Port Phillip Bay and sit under artificial lights in a remand centre. We see the city through intimate eyes and bedrooms, but also often – as the camera slowly tracks streets from above – as a city numbed and removed. Joe Marin (Alex Dimitriades), a high-powered investment broker, has been given the responsibility of picking up his son from school after an excursion while his…

There’s a great deal of expectation that comes with being first. That’s certainly true of Hussein Hassan’s The Dark Wind (2016), the first film1 about the attempted genocide of the Mesopotamian Yazidi people by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). For many viewers, it embodies an introduction to a religion and people that would have been previously unfamiliar. I’m not just referring to myself here. Upon awarding the 2016 APSA2 Cultural Diversity Award, under the patronage of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), to Hassan, international jury member Nansun Shi observed that ‘[c]oming to these Awards, I had not realised the subject matter of the Yazidis, and we wanted to highlight this to the world, and bring more attention to these people’.3 By extension, The…

When Patsy Ramsey speaks, it’s an uneasy quality in her voice – more so than the words themselves – that draws attention and doubt to the person we are faced with. Exhausted and wooden, her speech carries a discomfiting monotony, often upheld as evidence of her complicity in the 1996 murder of her six-year-old daughter, the Coloradan child-pageant queen JonBenét Ramsey. In footage of one of history’s most dissected and overanalysed press conferences, Patsy’s head bows in search of the appropriate adjectives to describe the crime, but her tone fails to fully emphasise the ones she lands on. She can’t imagine such a ‘horrible’ thing ever happening to her family. The crime was a ‘heinous’ one. She is ‘appalled’ that anyone could believe that she or her husband, John, seated…

When Australia is producing hits such as Lion (Garth Davis, 2016) and The Dressmaker (Jocelyn Moorhouse, 2015), it’s difficult to remember that, not too long ago, there was nothing. Gillian Armstrong has seen it all. In 1973, she became one of the twelve students of the Australian Film Television and Radio School’s (AFTRS) inaugural cohort, which also included Phillip Noyce and Chris Noonan. She was also part of the first wave of Australian filmmakers who enjoyed government support after an industry push for a film-development body was enacted by then–prime minister John Gorton in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Armstrong had her breakthrough later in 1973 when, under David Stratton’s reign, the Sydney Film Festival accepted her graduate film, One Hundred a Day, which subsequently won accolades at the…

THE QUOTA QUANDARY FOR AUSTRALIAN TELEVISION Rochelle Siemienowicz How much Australian content should television broadcasters be forced to produce and air? The issue of government-mandated quotas is generating heated debate in Australia right now, with two related inquiries currently underway. The House of Representatives’ probe into the sustainability of the film and TV industry as well as the Australian and Children’s Screen Content Review (conducted by the Department of Communications and the Arts, Screen Australia, and the Australian Communications and Media Authority) are expected to deliver their findings by the end of the year. The policy changes that result could shake the very foundations of our screen-production sector and transform the balance of programming on Australian television. Local content regulation is one of those Groundhog Day topics that return again…