Innehållsförteckning för No. 203 från Metro

I AM MOTHER’S AMBITIONS ARE TWOFOLD. ON ONE HAND, IT CONTINUES THE TRADITION OF SPECULATIVE FICTION BY POPULATING ITS STORY WITH QUESTIONS OF AGENCY, ETHICS AND MORE BESIDES. ON THE OTHER, IT STRIVES FOR BASER THRILLS, PROGRESSIVELY UNPACKING A CACHE OF TWISTS THROUGH A NARRATIVE LABYRINTH THICK WITH TENSION. Let’s get this out of the way early: I Am Mother (Grant Sputore, 2019) isn’t an especially original movie. To a degree, that goes part and parcel with its chosen genre, speculative sci-fi, given the long shadow cast by its predecessors over the last half-century or so. Taking place in the wake of an ‘extinction event’, the film opens in a sterile, secluded bunker resembling a spaceship. From this setting alone, you’d be hard-pressed not to think of the long-running Alien…

‘I WANTED TO UNDERSTAND THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE AND HOW YOU BECOME CAPABLE OF SUCH INHUMANE ACTS … SO, FOR ME, IT WAS JUST PLACING A THOUGHT IN THE AUDIENCE’S HEAD – THAT CHAKRA COULD GO IN ROM RAN’S DIRECTION IF HE’S NOT CAREFUL.’—RODD RATHJEN No-one could accuse emerging Australian director Rodd Rathjen of a lack of ambition. They could, perhaps, accuse him of a little too much ambition. His soulful second short, Tau Seru (2013), depicts a young sheep-herder and his father eking out a living in the foothills of the Himalayas. Inspired by his travels through India – where he witnessed the sparse lives of nomads outside the desert city of Leh in the fractious Kashmir region contested by Pakistan – it was shot at a dizzying altitude…

The personal often sits at the centre of the political. In One Child Nation (Nanfu Wang & Jialing Zhang, 2019), the Sundance US Grand Jury Prize–winning documentary that takes a skewering look at China’s state-introduced one-child policy, this sentiment is manifested in palpably clear-eyed fashion. The film presents a deep-dive investigation of this 36-year-long scheme, cracking open the corrupt networks and top-down ideology that enabled its longevity and its impact on the citizens traumatised during its implementation. The scale of the nationwide policy was enormous, setting a mandatory limit on the number of children born from 1979 to the end of 2015 – ostensibly having prevented 400 million births.1 But One Child Nation doesn’t succumb to simplistic, broad-strokes storytelling, instead opting for a more immediate and intimate approach. Initially flicking…

Morgana (Isabel Peppard & Josie Hess, 2019) recounts the true story of a middle-aged, clinically depressed housewife who reinvents herself into an internationally award-winning auteur known as ‘Morgana Muses’. Boundary-pushing and explicit – and this documentary is certainly explicit – it seems, at first, to be a fairly classic narrative of self-actualisation: an inspiring feminist liberation story with a sex-positive, age-positive heroine. But, over several years of filming, and through close, respectful collaboration with their subject, Peppard and Hess succeed in painting a much more nuanced portrait, one with an important mental-health message: that real life and real art require repeated transformations and reinventions – or even rebirths – especially when the cycles of bipolar disorder are involved. The film opens with Morgana walking into Australian bushland, scouting for a…

Dark Place (2019) is an anthology work comprised of five short films that variously represent the horrors of the Australian settler-colonial mythscape. Premiering at the 2019 Sydney Film Festival, the shorts – all made by Indigenous filmmakers – explore themes such as enslavement, monstrosity, possession and torture, among others. Such ideas resonate with philosopher Achille Mbembe’s conception of ‘necropolitics’, which posits that ‘[t]o exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power’.1 This refracted expression of Foucauldian ‘biopower’2 underpins the ways in which particular bodies – here, those of Indigenous people – are precariously suspended between life and death. As is typical of the horror genre, the Dark Place shorts attempt to evoke fears around haunted pasts, isolation, the unknown…

SHORT FILMS GIVEN SHORT SHRIFT? Rochelle Siemienowicz Once upon a time, short films were seen as the key to a successful Australian filmmaking career. Ideally, at the start of your professional trajectory, you’d make a stunningly crafted short film that would win awards locally or receive recognition internationally at Cannes, Venice or Berlin. Maybe your short film would even win an Oscar, like Adam Elliot’s Harvie Krumpet (2003) or Shaun Tan and Andrew Ruhemann’s The Lost Thing (2010) did. Then you would be supported to make a feature film, and away you’d go. Or that was the plan, anyway; successful shorts have never guaranteed sustained filmmaking careers. But, since the Australian film-making renaissance of the 1970s and the establishment of our film schools – including the Australian Film Television and…

‘I never set out to make a zombie movie, it kind of just ended up happening,’ Little Monsters (2019) writer/director Abe Forsythe told film website Den of Geek last year, ‘but it happened in a really organic way, because it just fed into this stuff about my son, and his first year of kindergarten, and everything he’s taught me.’1 Forsythe is best known for skewering Australian national myths. He wrote and directed the provocative race-riot satire Down Under (2016) and the buffoonish Ned Kelly spoof Ned (2003). By comparison, Little Monsters is not directly concerned with Australian identity – but it is shot through with Forsythe’s recognisably impertinent humour. As he explained to the website Screen Rant, the film was made independently, with a majority-Australian creative team, but closely followed…

The first production to come out of the Accelerator POD program – an initiative of Screen Canberra, Odin’s Eye Entertainment and The Film Distillery1 – The Furies (2019) is a brutal, relentlessly paced slasher-horror film. Inspired by both Richard Connell’s famed 1924 hunter-becomes-the-hunted short story ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ and the titular female figures from Greek mythology, it unflinchingly depicts acts of violence against women, but is ultimately a slap in the face to toxic patriarchal control. I speak to writer/director Tony D’Aquino as well as producers Andrew Marriott and Lisa Shaunessy about fulfilling the genre audience’s expectations for thrills and explicit kills while addressing the thorny subject of misogyny in the age of the #MeToo movement. Oliver Pfeiffer: What do you think made The Furies stand out among all…

‘They don’t just want to take my body. They want to take my soul!’ An actress (played by Wu Ke-Xi) finally lands her breakout role after a series of false starts and insubstantial ‘extra’ parts. But there’s a catch. She must submit to full-frontal nudity and an explicit sex scene. The male director (Shih Ming-Shuai) isn’t averse to physical abuse on set. The actress is humiliated for missing cues, endlessly objectified in both diegetic and extradiegetic spaces. At one point, she is slapped across the face. Her anxiety starts to manifest delusions and paranoid hallucinations; is she being followed? The young woman she believes to be trailing her may well be an incarnation of impostor syndrome; is the ‘right’ actress for the role waiting to take her place? The state…

The final act of the sporting career of Adnyamathanha and Narungga Australian Football League (AFL) player Adam Goodes served as a focal point for a … well, the polite term would be ‘discussion’ about racism – not just on the footy oval, but in Australian society and culture as a whole. The details are a matter of public record. During a game in the 2013 Indigenous Round, Goodes had security eject a thirteen-year-old spectator who had called him an ‘ape’, a term that has long been used as a racial slur. Following the incident, the Sydney Swans player became the subject of increasing vitriol from both game-day crowds and public commentators, including The Footy Show co-presenter Sam Newman and conservative 2GB radio broadcaster Alan Jones. After enduring a campaign of…

‘I think Black Mirror got it right,’ says director Justin Krook. ‘Technology is a reflection of ourselves.’1 The filmmaker is speaking at a Q&A after the world premiere of his documentary Machine at the 2019 Melbourne International Film Festival, answering – alongside co-producer Michael Hilliard, co–executive producer Brian McGinn and artificial intelligence (AI) professor Toby Walsh – all the big questions duly raised by a movie peering into the near-future evolution of machine learning. Krook’s evocation of the acclaimed Netflix / Channel 4 anthology series is notable, given that his film recounts cases of life imitating art. In Owen Harris’ classic 2013 Black Mirror episode ‘Be Right Back’, a young woman loses her husband in a car accident. To cope with her grief, she signs up for a service in…

‘So often, in movies, violent characters are portrayed as […] supernaturally evil or there’s [… an] ideological justification for everything they do,’ suggested director Andrew Dominik prior to the release of Chopper (2000), his debut film about the notorious Australian criminal Mark ‘Chopper’ Read. ‘I just wanted him to be a human being – sort of demystify him, in a way.’1 Chopper’s Chopper (Eric Bana) is a violent character, to be sure, but he isn’t supernaturally evil, nor does the narrative give any ideological justification for his actions. On the whole, he’s portrayed as very much human: full of contradictions and hang-ups, some more convincing than others. But is he demystified? It’s difficult to take Dominik at his word when we see Chopper rooted in place as he’s stabbed half…

A picture – or so the saying goes – is worth a thousand words. After all, to see something is to confirm its existence, verify its truth. But it’s not always as simple as that. When you’re looking from the outside in, it’s easy to miss the things that run beneath the surface. And a picture is never just that; the ‘truth’ of an image lies as much (if not more) in the framing of its photographer and the biases of its audience as it does in the captured lived experience of its subject. The nature and ethics of responsible representation form a longstanding debate among those who build their careers around documenting others’ lives. As such, it is perhaps unsurprising that they also form the core themes of a…

From its opening moments, the four-part 2019 Foxtel miniseries Lambs of God feels different. With its dilapidated convent at the top of a steeply plunging cliff on an island, it presents an immediate juxtaposition – the sheer logistical scope of such a striking visual sitting alongside the delicate and quiet intimacy of its (initial) three-piece acting ensemble. Through this establishing image, Lambs of God immediately sets itself up as a chilly work of the Australian Gothic. When we first see the faces of the sisters of St Agnes at its core – Sister Iphigenia (Essie Davis), Sister Margarita (Ann Dowd) and Sister Carla (Jessica Barden) – their skin is windswept pink, the capillaries on their faces blushing with colour against the grey woollen caped smocks they wear. Here is another…

Shahrbanoo Sadat was born in Tehran in 1990, but she’s not Iranian. For the first eleven years of her life, she had no official national identity. The child of Afghan immigrants – who’d left Afghanistan after it was invaded by Soviet troops in 1979 – Sadat lived in a country that wouldn’t grant her a passport and never made her feel at home. After the American war on Afghanistan deposed the Taliban government in late 2001, there was suddenly a strong, concerted push to have Afghan expats ‘return home’. ‘The Iranian government produced an enormous propaganda campaign through the media,’ Sadat would recall years on. ‘[T]hey put on a lot of pressure. They kicked my father out from the factory that he was working in and [my] school denied to…

Lili (2018), the latest documentary by writer/director Peter Hegedus, begins not with new or archival footage, but with historical re-enactment. In grainy, flickering black-and-white, the film lingers on the face of a small blonde girl, eight years old, clutching her mother’s hand as her father pushes a wheelbarrow.1 This image will recur again and again throughout the documentary. Glimpses of the family culminate in a longer, more complex scene, one that asks the viewer to interpret all that has come before through the lens of trauma. The small child is Lili Gárdonyi; it is 1944, and close to 200 Jewish labourers are about to be slaughtered at a train station. ‘The massacre has haunted me all my life,’ says Lili, now in her eighties, in voiceover. It’s a strong opening…

The reason the 1967 Hong Kong protests are brought up early on in Iron Fists and Kung Fu Kicks is that they are credited with the boom in the subgenre’s popularity. The documentary contends that, through their stories, kung-fu films tap into the very human feeling of being trapped by circumstance. There is a scene in Once upon a Time … in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019) in which Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), an underemployed stunt performer, finds himself on the set of 1960s TV series The Green Hornet with Bruce Lee (Mike Moh). The Lee of the film is cocky; Booth observes as the famous Eurasian actor lectures other members of the cast and crew, and doesn’t take long to make his disdain clear. The two find themselves in a ‘friendly’…

As one who has not seen Sons of Matthew for several decades, I find that Barnaby Smith’s lively and thoroughly researched account inspires me to renew acquaintance with one of Australian cinema’s legendary titles. The article not only offers a considered critical response to the film, but also places it in several revealing contexts. These include Charles Chauvel’s own background, the difficulties in financing the project, the sheer physical challenges of shooting in a daunting landscape and the cultural climate of the film’s production in matters such as racism, sexism and emerging nationalism. It is a film that may offer rewards to a range of historians – of cinema or otherwise.Brian McFarlane, Series Editor In March 2019, a special screening of the newly digitally restored version of Charles Chauvel’s Sons…