Table of contents for No. 180 in Metro

Like life itself, as the screenplay of The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014) reminds us several times, motherhood can be treacherous. What if your child is disobedient or doesn’t listen? What if your child is unstable or, worse, unlikeable? What if he doesn’t love you enough? Or loves you too much? One thing’s for sure: there’s no escape. By the third act of Kent’s Gothic mood piece, Amelia (Essie Davis) and her six-year-old son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), are trapped together in a nightmare, with no-one to turn to except each other. ‘Hell is other people,’ as Jean-Paul Sartre famously proposed.1 Except that this hell also contains a monster called the Babadook, who seems to have sprung fully formed from a creepy pop-up picture book in Samuel’s bookshelf – the ‘word made…

After premiering with a series of sell-out screenings at the 2013 Adelaide Film Festival (AFF), Sophie Hyde’s 52 Tuesdays went on to win the Directing Award in the World Cinema – Dramatic category at Sundance and the Crystal Bear for Best Film in the Generation 14plus category at Berlinale. Made as part of the South Australian Film Corporation’s FilmLab initiative for AFF, 52 Tuesdays sees Hyde’s company, Closer Productions, continuing to make works that blur the line between documentary and fiction in interesting ways. Shot with a cast of largely non-professional performers on consecutive Tuesdays over the course of a year, the film tells the story of teenager Billie (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) coming to terms with her mother Jane’s (Del Herbert-Jane) gender transition to James. Billie begins documenting her experiences on…

Forgetting extermination is part of extermination. — Jean-Luc Godard1 Truth isn’t guaranteed by style or expression. It isn’t guaranteed by anything. — Errol Morris How does the documentarian, a filmmaker whose stories are moulded from the clay of the real, chronicle a history constructed from fiction? This is one of the larger questions at work in Joshua Oppenheimer’s groundbreaking The Act of Killing (2012) – what he has termed a ‘documentary of the imagination’ – which examines a genocide in Indonesia that was never publicly acknowledged and for which there has never been any reparation. From 1965 to 1966, death squads led by paramilitaries and gangsters carried out the extermination of ‘communists’ (which included intellectuals, ethnic Chinese and unionists) at the behest of the military; it is believed that, within…

It may not be the largest or most prestigious of film festivals, but Vladivostok’s contribution to the festival circuit presents visitors with larger-than-life characters and events, and punches well above its weight in terms of cinematic selections. Russell Edwards recounts his most recent trip to the Russian port city. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out which comes first: the plane ticket or the movie ticket. With cinephilia and wanderlust intersecting at international film festivals, some people go to so many festivals – I’ve been accused of this myself – that it seems we are either afraid to go home or don’t have a home to go to. Of course, part of the art of putting on any festival is to make the visiting critic, filmmaker, actor or programmer feel at…

Australia is a difficult market for horror movies. Particularly in recent years, Australia has been regarded as a graveyard for many horror films released theatrically.1 This is not to say that Australians have not enjoyed the occasional scary movie on the big screen. But what types of horror films have been popular with Australian audiences at the box-office remains poorly understood. Horror films revolve around monsters, the fear of death and the transgression of boundaries, and they aim to scare audiences through ‘gross-out’ or ‘creep-out’ factors (some combine both). The former refers to shocking and graphic portrayals of gore and violence – as seen in the sadistic torture of backpackers in Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005), which depicts limbs being hacked off and eyes being cut from nerve endings. The latter…

The past year has seen genre festivals and competitions rise to prominence in Australia and New Zealand. Alicia Lewis gives us a rundown of three horror-related events that are brimming with opportunity for up-and-coming filmmakers from the region. Australia and New Zealand have been taking a journey into the macabre. Horror film festivals such as Monster Fest and Stranger With My Face are gaining impetus, providing challenges and opportunities for emerging filmmakers in Australia. Meanwhile, New Zealand’s Make My Horror Movie offers a pathway for budding filmmakers to have their work made and internationally marketed. Benefiting not just filmmakers, these events also allow audiences to become familiar with local talent and engage with a genre that isn’t always appreciated on our shores. Monster Fest Based in Melbourne, Monster Pictures produces…

The jagged edges of Victoria’s southwest coast, formed by the surging surf against a brutal yet fragile coastline, provide both location and metaphor in Rowan Woods’ adaptation of Peter Temple’s crime thriller The Broken Shore. The telemovie, which premiered at the 2013 Adelaide Film Festival and aired on ABC TV in February 2014, is underpinned by the notion of ‘brokenness’ – extending from the eroded limestone cliffs to the people, buildings and institutions shattered by a network of crimes that keeps them in its clutches. Although upholding the Australian myth that a harsh, fickle landscape can only be inhabited by stoic, resilient individuals, The Broken Shore demonstrates that rural communities, just like the coastline, are crumbling, falling into a sea of desolation. Both place and people are tied to a…

Fallout (Lawrence Johnston, 2013) ends as it perhaps only ever could: with the fiery inferno of a mushroom cloud, the white flash of an atomic blast, the howl of wind in the eerie silence after detonation, and its simple title typed in white letters on black nothingness. It’s the end of the film as it is the end of the world, the documentary finishing with the vision of imminent extinction that has been mankind’s bedfellow for over half a century. Johnston’s film is about the making of Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959), the first major American movie production to be staged in Australia. But its title differs markedly from, say, When Hollywood Came to Melbourne, a 2005 book by Philip R Davey, which chronicles the same event that saw…

Crowdfunding has given life to creative projects that might otherwise have fallen straight to the cutting-room floor. Zenobia Frost speaks to independent producers Katrina Fleming and Grace Julia about their diverse experiences crowdfunding their respective Australian film projects, Canopy and Maiden. Way back at the dawn of 2012, crowd-funding was barely a twinkle in the budgets of arts workers and entrepreneurs. To put this into perspective, it would be a few months before singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer brought crowdfunding platform Kickstarter into the limelight with an album-and-tour campaign that would raise a record-breaking US$1 million.1 Only two years on, crowdfunding campaigns have become ubiquitous in our Facebook and Twitter feeds, embodying a frontline funding option for creatives at a time when private patronage has dwindled and government funding seems increasingly mythical.…

Immediacy, Education and Combating Piracy in the Digital Age TARA JUDAH According to TorrentFreak’s total download figures, Australia had the highest number of illegal downloads, compared to the rest of the world, of the series finale of hit TV show Breaking Bad. With 90,000 downloads recorded, Australia was responsible for 18 per cent of TorrentFreak’s total figure – twice that of both the UK and the US. Here, the episode aired on cable network Foxtel six-and-a-half hours after its US premiere. And to the Breaking Bad fans with Foxtel, who knew the internet would be abuzz with spoilers, over six hours was too long to wait. (A writer for The Guardian’s ‘Australia Culture’ blog even openly admitted to downloading the episode illegally, despite having a Foxtel subscription, and went on…

Oliver Pfeiffer: You were a fan of the late Richard Franklin so why remake Patrick (1978)? What did you hope to achieve? Mark Hartley: It’s interesting – I’m a filmmaker who wanted to make a feature film for a long time and I ended up doing a few documentaries after doing music videos. On Not Quite Hollywood [2008] I got talking to the original producer [of Patrick, Antony I Ginnane] and, out of all the films featured, I felt Patrick was a good candidate for a remake purely because the technology had changed so much that you could actually bring something new. We really loved the central idea but Richard Franklin had been constantly at odds with his cinematographer [Don McAlpine] in terms of making it…

Horror films, if successful, do not make available some comprehensive sense of relief after the scare moments. They leave residue, and the conversation then broadens to style and substance. The idea of horror as a genre has become a slippery one – so riddled with the stigma left behind by cheap slashers, computer-generated aberrations, and the antiquated, almost stagnant portraits and regurgitations of werewolves, zombies, vampires and ghosts (not to mention witches, warlocks, mummies and water beasts) that the construct of that which brings terror lacks definition at its core. And considering all the subgenres and interlocking categories, spin-offs and subliminal counter-themes, we are inevitably left with a rather complicated lexicon that, by the patterns of its own complexity, seems to have been stretched too thin. The aftermath has slowly…

Imagine getting a phone call from a local production house telling you that the worst events of your life are going to be dramatised and broadcast on national television. You object in the strongest terms. You are already traumatised by your experiences and you just want to recover in private. You fear for your own or your children’s mental health. The voice on the other end of the phone continues: ‘But we’ve got David Wenham …’ For most of us, of course, that scenario will only ever be the stuff of nightmares. Our personal misfortunes, be they the untimely deaths of loved ones or relationship breakdowns, rarely make the cut for prime-time TV. But there are tragedies that have that strange twist or combination of elements that renders them newsworthy.…

Lost Years (2011) is a feature-length documentary examining 150 years of Chinese diaspora across Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia. It has been relatively successful, receiving nominations at the AMPIA Awards, the Gemini Awards and the Yorkton Short Film and Video Festival in Canada, and winning Best Feature Documentary at the Rhode Island International Film Festival. I attended the Australian premiere, presented by Colourfest, in September 2013. Focusing on the genealogical journey of Kenda Gee, a fourth-generation Chinese-Canadian, the documentary was a perfect fit with the ethos of Colourfest as a film festival that focuses exclusively on diasporic and culturally diverse stories and supports a politics of self-representation. The screening was prefaced with speeches that located the film more firmly in its Australian historical context. Hong Lim MP,…

Discussing the percentages of adults who believe in ghosts, author and sceptic Guy P Harrison suggests that the real numbers are likely to be much higher than the figures reported by studies and surveys. After all, the word itself carries so many ludicrous connotations that those who believe in things like spiritual forces and balances, the immortality of the soul, and the presence of higher powers and guiding forces – presumably a large proportion of religious believers – might still roll their eyes at the idiotic naivety of the term. Regardless of whether this distinction is meaningful or the distancing reasonable, it’s certainly true that ghosts have a particularly malleable value in both culture and media. Historically, ghosts have lent themselves to a certain kind of slapstick silliness or –…