Innehållsförteckning för No. 195 från Metro

Yolanda Ramke and Ben Howling are among that fortunate breed of filmmaker who builds a reputation on the strength of one undeniably good short film. In this case, their 2013 Tropfest effort, Cargo – a heartfelt, elegiac riff on the zombie subgenre – put them on the map with several million views on YouTube, soon after which they went on to sign with powerbrokers Creative Artists Agency (CAA).1 It’s worth recalling that similar good fortune struck for Leigh Whannell and James Wan, whose Saw prototype – made when they were recent RMIT graduates – was immediately snapped up by Hollywood and made into their first full-length feature, which premiered in 2004.2 It’s a brave new world. Ramke and Howling tell me their decision to develop a specifically Australian property as…

Jacques Lacan’s notion of the ‘mirror stage’ embodies a powerful intersection of psychoanalysis and film theory; when identical twins are the focal point of a cinematic narrative, the work becomes fertile ground for exploring the subconscious terrain of identity formation. According to Lacan, the fragile human ego is on an endless quest for reconciliation with the promised illusion of a ‘perfect’ self. The infant first glimpses itself in the mirror and perceives a gloriously unified whole – a being in control of its bodily mechanisms. This contrasts with the fledgling agency of the infant, who is yet to master control of its limbs. Even further away from the child’s grasp is an ability to exert control over the physical and social environment. Lacan called that first interaction with one’s own…

The poster for Jungle (Greg McLean, 2017) features actor Daniel Radcliffe with a shaggy beard, wearing a soaked-through flannel shirt and brandishing a machete, surrounded by Amazon greenery and mist. ‘Nature has only one law – survival’, reads the tagline. As film posters go, this is a lot. It’s hardly a new concept to market a film, especially one with horror and thriller elements, in a way that is somewhat misleading, but bless Jungle’s team for trying. The finished product isn’t as savage as that slice of imagery may suggest, but, if there’s one element Australian film marketing needs, it’s chutzpah. Jungle doesn’t actually aspire to be the sort of movie that audiences might expect from a Greg McLean film about a bunch of people stuck in the Amazon … Is it…

The typical road movie finds profundity in the quotidian, drawing together apparently unrelated encounters into an overarching, epiphanic tapestry. It’s tempting to so categorise Kirsten Tan’s Pop Aye (2017), which follows the journey of middle-aged architect Thana (Thaneth Warakulnukroh) and his childhood friend, a fully-grown Indian elephant named Popeye, across Thailand. While Thana and Popeye’s journey hit the familiar narrative beats of the road movie, however, Tan’s screenplay resolutely resists romanticising the open road. That’s not to suggest Pop Aye avoids the contemplative rhythm found in the greats of its genre. To my eye, it most closely resembles – in both tone and narrative – David Lynch’s gentle The Straight Story (1999); just trade the old ride-on mower for an old elephant, and Midwest America for northeastern Thailand. The films…

I remember thinking – well, actually, wasn’t thinking; I felt. I felt just sheer joy. And I felt this weird sensation of bewilderment that no-one in this country knew about this choir. How is this possible? I’m on the phone with documentary filmmaker and video installation / projection artist Naina Sen; she’s recounting the first Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir rehearsal that she attended, in a small church in Alice Springs. While she was born in New Delhi, Sen has spent the last seven years working with Aboriginal people and communities, and, in turn, has ‘had access and privilege to hear some pretty extraordinary music’. The choir comprises an exceptional group of women from various remote communities in the desert region around Ntaria (Hermannsburg) – situated in the hills of…

Welcome to Questa Casa. I’m Carmel; I’m the madam here. My story is that I fell into a deep pit of depression when I was widowed. Went to see my lady doctor; I said, ‘I think my hormones need adjusting.’ She said, ‘There’s nothing the matter with your hormones – you go out and do something with your life.’ So I went home and I looked at all the businesses for sale […] I [later] went to see my lady doctor; she said, ‘You’re looking much better, what have you done?’ I said, ‘I’ve bought a brothel in Kalgoorlie.’ She said, ‘Oh god, I meant for you to do charity work.’ Questa Casa provides director/co-writer Sascha Ettinger Epstein and producer/co-writer Claire Haywood with a portal into the strange vertex of…

CRITICAL FAILURE: THE ABC’S SCREEN TIME Rochelle Siemienowicz It’s been three years since David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz farewelled the nation with the final episode of their iconic weekly film-review show, At the Movies. Aired on 9 December 2014, this episode was watched by a metropolitan viewing audience of 726,000 – a testament to the popularity of these illustrious critics who had spent nearly three decades duelling amiably about new-release films. They covered everything from international blockbusters and European arthouse fare, to low-budget Australian features and documentaries. It’s for this latter category – Australian cinema – that Stratton and Pomeranz are most sorely missed, for nothing new has filled the gap in connecting a local viewing audience with the films that are ostensibly made for it. In our small (and…

Directed by Steven Kastrissios, Bloodlands (2017) is a co-production between Australia and the Republic of Albania, a small European country nestled on the south-west of the Balkan Peninsula. Yet the folklore, culture and history that lie at the core of this film are thousands of miles away – literally and figuratively – from The Horseman (2008), the director’s distinctly Australian debut. While The Horseman’s title is riddled with the apocalyptic overtones of the Book of Revelation, its folkloric associations with ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s iconic 1890 poem ‘The Man from Snowy River’ underscore its essential ‘Australianness’. The Horseman tells the story of Christian (Peter Marshall), whose teenage daughter Jesse (Hannah Levien) has died of a heroin overdose. When an anonymously sent adult movie called Young City Sluts 2, which includes footage of…

Blue World Order (Ché Baker & Dallas Bland, 2016) is a science fiction action-adventure set during the aftermath of a nuclear war that has annihilated the Northern Hemisphere, with the world’s remaining population controlled by a self-appointed totalitarian government using a biotech virus. The film was shot entirely in Canberra and features heavyweights Billy Zane, Bruce Spence and Jack Thompson among the cast, alongside newcomer Jake Ryan in the lead role. I speak to Baker and producer/co-writer Sarah Mason about the benefits of dreaming big, thinking global, creatively utilising unique locales and learning from experienced mentors when making an ambitious low-budget film project a reality. Oliver Pfeiffer: Where did the concept behind Blue World Order stem from? Ché Baker: Initially, Dallas and I were interested in a kidnapping film concerning…

In Wolf and Sheep (Shahrbanoo Sadat, 2016), rural village life is a picture of structure and order. Men argue about the size of their flocks and what it says about their standing, while their wives embark on the same line of thinking by judging others based on their fertility and children. Women fulfil domestic tasks, knowing their place and purpose within the community. Kids attend to sheep and goats, herding them between grazing fields, but also abide by segregated gender lines. Girls gossip about local comings and goings – who is having affairs, or acting unusually; who is and isn’t popular – when they’re not carrying out their chores. Boys whirl slings filled with rocks, trade insults about one another’s mothers and boast about their physical prowess. As everyday social…

In the late 1920s, the Arrernte families of Ntaria (later established as the Lutheran mission of Hermannsburg) in the Northern Territory lost an estimated 85 per cent of their children to scurvy and malnutrition, brought on by severe drought.1 Stricken with grief after having lost a daughter,2 young father Albert Namatjira – only in his twenties – then resolved to use whatever he had been given to improve the lot of his community, so long as it brought in the money. When the white artist Rex Battarbee, accompanied by colleague John Gardner, drove a converted Ford Model T on unsealed roads from Melbourne to Arrernte country in 1934, Namatjira found his opportunity. Battarbee and Gardner had come all this way once before – an utterly mad distance at the time…

When Netflix launched in Australia in March 2015, it was an exciting time. After years of being denied the subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service, we had a Netflix of our own – and with it came the promise of original programming. For years, the streaming giant has been disrupting the television and film industries with its ‘binge’ model of making every episode of a show available at the same time. Following the release of its first series, House of Cards, in 2013, it has built an empire of original series and films. With Netflix having a sizeable budget (now estimated at US$6 billion1 ) to spend on original programming as part of its rapid expansion globally, surely – like many other countries – Australia would have a Netflix original series of…

An Australian–US co-production directed by Chris Peckover, who co-wrote the script with Zack Kahn, Better Watch Out (2016) is an immensely fun black comedy replete with horror tropes – as humorous as it is disturbing. It sets up a typical babysitter-versus-home-invader scenario before unexpectedly veering into a study of the twisted desires of a twelve-year-old psychopath. The film is about the moral panic surrounding adolescence, particularly the surge of hormones that leads to volatile emotions and risky behaviour. It also serves as a derisive critique of privilege, depicting the darkness concealed behind the charming picket fences of upper-middle-class suburban houses – and the dangerous expectation of male teens that they can do and have what they want, without consequence. After a limited festival release under the fairly generic title of…

Fedora-wearing detectives ripped from the pages of Raymond Chandler. Supernatural wraiths clad in black overcoats, their existential experiments splintering a city shrouded in shadows. And, at the core of it all, a dark love story. European auteurs Luis Buñuel and Andrei Tarkovsky – whose unsettling imagery, suggests Alex Proyas, served as inspiration for his Dark City (1998) – would certainly be pleased. With the tragedy of Brandon Lee’s accidental death on the set of Proyas’ The Crow (1994)1 still but a recent memory, this twisted, genre-redefining tale was certainly a tough sell. But, twenty years on, Dark City has built a reputation among a horde of cult fans as a fascinatingly elusive, strange noir puzzle. Enveloped in skin-crawling, bile-green hues, the film is a whirligig of transmutable buildings – miniatures…

In her essay ‘The Empathy Exams’, Leslie Jamison writes of her experience as a medical actor; she is given a script and tasked with performing the role of a ‘standardised patient’ for a doctor-in-training. The aspiring doctors are rated on their performance using a checklist, with points awarded for recognising symptoms, picking up on particular behaviours and identifying potentially significant elements of family history. But what is ‘generally acknowledged as the most important’ trait or ability is item number 31: ‘Voiced empathy for my situation/problem.’ We are instructed about the importance of this first word, voiced. It’s not enough for someone to have a sympathetic manner or use a caring tone of voice. The students have to say the right words to get credit for compassion.1 I spent a lot…

At the beginning of The Challenge (2016), Yuri Ancarani’s film about a falconry tournament in the Qatari desert, we hard-cut from the opening credits to a striking, puzzling image. There, in an otherwise-barren stretch of sand, stands a towering black rectangle, looming in the middle of the frame, in the middle of the desert. It’s a visual evocation of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) that immediately puts the viewers on the back foot. What is this shape? Is it real or a visual effect? What is its purpose, narratively speaking? And what’s it doing in what’s supposed to be a documentary? ‘I could even tell you that the whole film is staged, and that the people you see are actors,’ Ancarani has said, playfully.1 The…

Australia didn’t enter into any international co-productions until 1986, when we signed a memorandum of understanding with France;1 this makes our film industry a very late bloomer compared to others across the world. As our burgeoning industry started to catch the world’s gaze during our golden era in the 1970s and 1980s, creatives overseas displayed a keen interest in working with Australians. Equally, when Australian filmmakers – such as Jan Chapman, Peter Weir, Jane Campion, Bruce Beresford and Phillip Noyce – became successful, they started to look for opportunities further afield. While some went to Hollywood, others sought to continue telling Australian stories – albeit with bigger budgets and greater access to foreign markets. Yet co-productions haven’t always caught fire in this country. For every success like UK–Australian–US title Lion…