Innehållsförteckning för No. 189 från Metro

Sing Street Like his earlier films ONCE and BEGIN AGAIN, SING STREET is inspired by writer/director John Carney’s life and love for music. It tells the story of 14-year-old Cosmo (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) growing up in 80’s Dublin. Cosmo needs to break free of a home strained by his parents’ relationship and money troubles, deal with his drop-out older brother, and survive a new public school where the kids are rough and the teachers are tougher. He meets a mysterious and seductive young woman and, in an attempt to woo her, offers to feature her in a music video for his band. Except he isn't in a band and access to a video camera is hard to come by. Recruiting fellow musicians to help in his plan, Cosmo writes a song,…

Impressing critics and audiences alike at 2015 events such as Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival and the London Film Festival, Australian director Joseph Sims-Dennett’s extraordinary supernatural horror film Observance was finally released in his home country earlier this year. The film follows desperate surveillance investigator Parker (Lindsay Farris) as he prematurely returns to work following a family tragedy that haunts him both emotionally and financially. Tasked with spying on a woman named Tenneal (Stephanie King), he is temporarily housed in a grotty apartment across from hers, the disturbing events he witnesses through her window mirroring his own downward spiral towards a tragic and inevitably violent conclusion. Cinema has long been fascinated with the act of surveillance, and the title of Observance alone tips its hat to this lineage: it is…

As the unspoken Australian tradition would have us believe, all ethnic and cultural minorities have to be the butt of some very racist torment before they’re accepted as part of the (ostensibly) diverse fabric of our nation. As actual racists would have us believe, right now, it’s just the turn of the Arabs and/or Muslims. A growing body of research even indicates that there’s a widespread inability to distinguish between the terms ‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim’, with audiences often conflating the two.1 The recognition of this misconception is vital for understanding the place of the Nine Network’s recent comedy Here Come the Habibs on local television. Australia’s rocky history of representing cultural minorities in infantilising and derogatory ways left many feeling uneasy about the release of Habibs. With trailers boasting images…

 In the two decades since its publication, Timothy Conigrave’s 1995 memoir Holding the Man has become the urtext of Australian queer narratives. Beloved not just for its sweeping high school romance but also for its unapologetic realism in portraying an era of freedom, change and devastation, Holding the Man has achieved the rare feat of transcending the specificity of its time and place. And, though it is chiefly a book born of its Melbourne private-school milieu and singular perspective on the AIDS crisis, it has also aged – as a text – into adulthood via theatrical and film adaptations. The interviews in Bird and Sharpe’s film give those outside perspectives prominence, and provide those who were close to Conigrave and Caleo the ability to reflect meaningfully and cathartically on their…

 Spread across smartphones, multiplexes, art houses, laptops, festivals and torrents, cinema is changing. But one thing remains the same: the problem of distribution for auteurist, independent and art cinema. The makers of small films have found themselves pushed out of mainstream cinema spaces by widely released, cross-marketed superhero and comic-book franchises. These tentpole films form the vanguard of the major studios’ push to consolidate the theatrical market in the midst of competition from new viewing outlets. For the team behind director and choreographer Stephen Page’s debut feature, Spear (2015), the problem of distribution is even more acute. How do you ensure that a dance-based film that is almost dialogue-free has a life in the context of a blockbuster-filled cinema market? The austerity of Spear’s settings … and the movement within…

 It’s a tiny, unassuming little film, but in a lot of ways Pawno (Paul Ireland, 2015) feels like the culmination of myriad socio-economic strands visible in Australian cinema since 1992. A low-budget project funded partly by backers on Pozible, the story is a tapestry of different narratives all set in Melbourne’s hipster hotspot of Footscray. Taking place over a single day, the twelve characters all orbit Les’ (John Brumpton) pawnshop, conducting business there, working nearby or simply loitering on the street. Some of them have big dreams, while others have big secrets, but the common ground for all of them is that their fates run through the pawnshop that day: buying, selling, bartering, begging. The recession that gripped the suburb in 1992 has gone, but so has the working class,…

 At the end of the very funny Australian mockumentary Rats and Cats (Tony Rogers, 2007), the earnest – and gormless – interviewer Ben (Adam Zwar) is talking to former TV and film star Darren (Jason Gann), who has secluded himself in a seaside retreat after a sexual peccadillo. They are discussing Australian cinema, and Ben suggests that Darren’s last film ‘didn’t really set the box office on fire’. The rest of the exchange proceeds thus: Local productions tend to find their way to the arthouse end of the exhibition spectrum. The overwhelming exception is, of course, Mad Max: Fury Road, which has done the sort of business (over A$21 million) that is only conceivable here in the widest distribution. DARREN: What Australian film does? BEN: Why do you think that…

 The Wizards of Aus may, at first glance, seem like an unlikely candidate for the SBS stable. A broad-humoured parody of fantasy pop culture, stuffed with impressive (and commercially appealing) special effects and created by a YouTube wunderkind (writer/director Michael Shanks), it sounds like the kind of thing that would be deemed too mainstream for Australia’s most ‘alternative’ free-to-air network. Cleverly, however, Shanks uses his brand of glossy comedy to weave in themes of immigration and cultural identity that are not only timely, but also wholly compatible with this 2016 series’ network home. The show wastes no time in establishing a darkly cynical undertone … For the majority of the series, Wizards adopts a stridently pro-immigrant stance, with the Australian population portrayed as deeply prejudiced. The show’s premise is classic…

The walls of the Red Mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan, are tall and crimson – harbingers of the secrecy honoured inside. Young children learn the alphabet using charts that proclaim ‘A is for “Allah”’ and ‘B is for “bandook”’, the Urdu word for gun. The diagram beside the translation of ‘collision’ depicts an aeroplane clumsily grafted onto the Twin Towers. Upwards of 10,000 students, many of them from destitute backgrounds, across some thirty madrassah – Islamic seminaries1 – are taken in by the institution; there, they’re indoctrinated with an interpretation of Islam that espouses jihad and despises outsiders. But the role of the mosque is a complex one, strung awkwardly between a radicalising agent and a boarding house. To shut it down would be to forego the salvation from poverty it…

It is commonplace for public discussions about the need for gender equality to be met with and dominated by arguments as to why equality is either not possible or not needed. Unusually, Screen Australia’s new Gender Matters initiative has made clear that our own policymakers are among those advancing a weak line on how to tackle the rivets of gender inequality in Australia’s film industry. Screen Australia now has a gender-equality policy that does not aim for gender equality. Announced in December 2015, Gender Matters aims to correct the woeful fact that, in Australian feature filmmaking, women account for merely 32 per cent of producers, 16 per cent of directors and 23 per cent of writers. The initiative comprises two core streams: Brilliant Stories funds storytelling by female creative teams,…

 Michael Rowe’s Early Winter (2015) begins at the intimate centre of a fractured relationship. The film opens on married couple David (Paul Doucet) and Maya (Suzanne Clément) mid-coitus. Their lovemaking is indifferent; their demeanour afterwards is uncommunicative. She brushes off a line of inquiry with a tense ‘don’t start’, and soon shuffles off the end of the bed while he lies at the head. They’re separated by the cinema screen: her hunched form out of focus to the left of the frame, his supine body, to the right. Adopting David’s perspective reinforces the film’s deliberate drabness. The monotony of his life, combined with the wintry setting and cool cinematography, conjures an atmosphere of decay, despair and, most powerfully, depression. It’s not shot like a traditional sex scene. Rowe and director…

 During the opening credits of indie drama Broke (2016), the low-budget fiction-feature debut of Australian filmmaker Heath Davis, we see transitory shots of the industrial landscape of the mining city of Gladstone, Queensland. A conversation between a couple of evening-radio DJs is overheard – they are discussing exactly why Rugby League is frequently in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, yet its players are looked up to as role models. As this conversation takes place, a hazy shot focuses on the unshaven, drunken wreck of an individual we soon come to learn is Ben ‘BK’ Kelly (Steve Le Marquand), a former Rugby League player of some repute. Shambling through a now-listless existence of gambling and scrounging for money, BK cuts a grave, middle-aged shadow of his former self –…

 It’s often remarked that we live in the golden age of television. In some ways, this appears to be true: the medium has never been taken more seriously by creators, critics and audiences. The best writers have elevated show recaps into an artform. The small screen, once maligned as the ‘idiot box’, is no longer a second-rate substitute for the feature film. With so many impeccable productions at our fingertips, it’s impossible not to see Australian television as being comparable to its global counterparts. The comparisons, however, are deeply unflattering. Australian television is a hermetic ecosystem, oddly resistant to real-life trends. Despite waves of immigration from Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa over the past half-century, the faces we see on local TV – on breakfast programs; presenting the…