Table of contents for No. 178 in Metro

When I saw The Rocket (Kim Mordaunt), which was filmed in Laos and spoken in the native tongue of Lao, at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival, I was surrounded by a mostly appreciative American audience who sounded surprised when the Australian funding logo came up. Should Australia be making films that don’t tell ‘our’ stories? The question has been discussed frequently lately, especially in the hubbub surrounding Baz Luhrmann’s is-it-Australian-or-isn’t-it The Great Gatsby (2013). The Rocket may not be about Australia per se, but Australia is part of a global industry that should be seeking to make films without having to adhere to mere border restrictions. As Australian society becomes more culturally diverse, so too must our cinema. This past decade has seen a dramatic growth in the number of…

When Foxtel and FremantleMedia announced they were going to remake the iconic Australian television drama Prisoner, there was a mixed reaction from fans and critics. The original was, and remains, so loved that an update seemed both completely unjustified and potentially disastrous. As Alan McKee argued in 2001, Prisoner has remained ‘a cult success’ that ‘survives in the public archive as both melodramatic and realistic’.1 Prior to the series’ release, Foxtel’s executive director of television, Brian Walsh, promised to keep key aspects of the original, telling the press: Wentworth will be bold Australian storytelling with this remarkable group of actors portraying the rivalries, power struggles and heartbreak of prison life in a drama tailor-made for the subscription television audience.2 Wentworth’s executive producer and FremantleMedia director of drama, Jo Porter, conveyed…

The place just fucking smelled of cockroaches. There’s no sewage system in Manila, and people have nothing there. People with, like, no arms, no legs, no eyes, no teeth. This is how Claire Danes described Manila after filming Brokedown Palace (Jonathan Kaplan, 1999) on location in the Philippines.1 The comments spurred the Manila city council to declare Danes persona non grata and to ban her films from being shown throughout the city.2 In Mondomanila (Khavn De La Cruz, 2012), this disparaging description is relished; splashed across the screen during the intro, it becomes prescriptive, as this low-budget feature showcases the disenchanted, depraved and disfigured characters that so repulsed Danes. Tactically, Mondomanila revels in this form of outsider disgust, elevating the real slums of Manila to fantasy; it’s an exploitation film…

Art and technology have a significant yet often strained relationship. It can be likened to a perpetual neck-and-neck race: one occasionally pulls ahead or is overtaken before they eventually settle back to a familiar equilibrium. Nowhere is this synergy-cum-competition more apparent than in cinema, which is arguably one of the most technological of art forms. The history of cinema is in many ways a microcosm of our exponential technological growth over the last hundred-odd years. Cinema rarely exists without experimentation or innovation, and these changes it undergoes are shot through with a resolute Darwinism. New technologies live or die by the artistry with which they are used and whether the industry chooses to accept them. Some never quite catch on, such as film colourisation, which is still done on occasion…

Gaining distribution through a label like Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz’s Troma Entertainment could be seen by some as something of a dubious endorsement. Best known for distributing films like Surf Nazis Must Die (Peter George, 1987), Troma seems to thrive on exploiting a subcultural fascination with ‘bad’ filmmaking: low budget and low quality. A focus on intentionally laughable filmmaking, however, invariably misses the real allure of the ‘bad’ film. As Susan Sontag described in her 1964 essay ‘Notes on “Camp”’, there remains a difference between being ‘bad to the point of being laughable’ and ‘bad to the point of being enjoyable’. Low-budget cinema may frequently fail, but – as Tim Burton suggested in his loving semifictional biopic of Edward D Wood Jr – it is the exuberance, almost an…

In 1972, I accompanied my parents to a political rally to see the charismatic Gough Whitlam in full ‘It’s Time’ swing. It was certainly the first such rally I had ever been to, and I suspect it may have been the only one my parents ever attended. But this 1972 campaign was quite different from anything that had gone before it in Australian politics: for my family – middle-class, what would now be called ‘aspiring’ – Whitlam represented something new and totally inspirational. This was not grubby partisan politics – the kind that brings cynicism and ennui and that, unfortunately, we still know so well. Rather, Gough (and back then we all seemed to refer to him on a first-name basis; he was part of the family) had an actual…

What’s making the biggest impact on Hollywood movie studios right now? Diva-like star demands? The rising costs of marketing? Zombies? Grady Smith is an Entertainment Weekly writer with his eye on the next big thing in Hollywood – China. ‘The potential of the Chinese market is the biggest thing that’s driving studio motivations right now,’ he says. In a long-stagnating North American market, Hollywood knows not only that it can’t ignore the enormous buying power of the rapidly emerging Chinese middle class, but also that actively courting it is the only path to growth. Western economies – the traditional market for Hollywood fare – haven’t grown very fast since the late 1990s, even aside from the carnage of the 2008 global financial crisis. Meanwhile, the costs involved in making and…

Dementia is arguably the defining age-related disease of the twenty-first century.1 But, equally, the word ‘dementia’ and the associated medico-scientific discourses around the disease have been described as invoking ‘a profound dread’ about an illness that has displaced cancer as the ‘scourge of modern times’.2 Screen-based media – film and TV in particular – have assumed an increasingly important role in shaping public awareness and opinion on age-related themes, including the risk factors and consequences associated with major diseases. The representation of dementia on the mainstream screen offers a particularly complex challenge. Rather than simply constituting a disheartening ‘demotic for late life’, depictions of the disease offer a potent illustration of how mainstream media can inform audiences about a significant public health issue.3 Historically, dementia has been depicted obliquely through…

Recently, there has been a slew of Australian and New Zealand directors who have travelled abroad in search of more universal tales. In Leo Woodhead’s case, it was Eastern Europe that provided the backdrop for his short film Cargo, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2007. Made with the NZ$8000 that he saved from working as a bartender, the film saw Woodhead move to the Czech Republic to investigate stories of human trafficking. When I was in film school [at the University of Auckland] in my last year, we had to do a graduation project and all the students were doing … a kind of ‘she loses her toy bike’ story. I don’t mean to downgrade them but they were all pretty small stories, all set in Auckland.…

When Asghar Farhadi won an Academy Award in 2012, he instantly became the most famous Iranian filmmaker in the world. Iran had been, by that point, celebrated in world-cinema circles for a quarter of a century, with directors like Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf already considered part of the pantheon of auteurs. But only one Iranian film had received an Oscar nomination – Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven (1997), for Best Foreign Language Film in 1999 – before Farhadi’s masterful A Separation (2011) received two: Best Foreign Language Film and, in a pleasant surprise, Best Original Screenplay. When A Separation won the former, it became Iran’s first ever Oscar winner – interesting, too, that this all-American celebration of Hollywood’s global might honoured a film from a country that was demonised…

It would be easy to write off Blind Detective (Johnnie To) as a simple, forgettable film. First screened at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and opening to mixed reviews, the Hong Kong feature takes its title literally: it is about a detective who is blind. However, the film is an interesting mixture of dark and light. It is also part of a new wave of films and television series that are changing the way crime stories are told. The film’s eponymous detective, Johnston (Andy Lau), is a former member of the Hong Kong police department who was forced to retire after he lost his vision. Now he makes his money by solving cold cases and claiming the reward money. His success draws the attention of independently wealthy police officer Ho…

In Bob We Trust (Lynn-Maree Milburn, 2013) begins with a breathless flourish: a potted, sardonic, quietly critical account of the history of religion – and, through it, the history of the world – as told by Melbourne’s beloved ‘people’s priest’, Father Bob Maguire. For a man of the cloth, his retelling of the divine is shockingly lacking in reverence; it feels far closer to a political reading of the birth of Christ, the rise of Christianity and the establishment of the Catholic Church. Speaking at a rapid-fire pace, with his wry wit never far from the narrative, Maguire sees the ancient history of Palestine as comparable to its modern counterpart: one of uprising and oppression. The formation of the Roman Catholic Church is, effectively, the corporatisation of an initial rebellion…

Looking East: An Interview with Mario Andreacchio SANDY CAMERON There is a certain accepted template for raising finance for a feature film in Australia. After around three years of script development, a project is shown to the marketplace to attach local distribution and an international sales agent for cash advances or marketing guarantees. These attachments trigger state- and federal-agency funding, and then the Producer Offset (40 per cent of qualifying Australian expenditure) is cash-flowed into the budget through an agency or private film fund. It’s a proven template up to a point, but it’s increasingly difficult to execute. In the current landscape, there is a paucity of Australian distributors and a high demand on limited government investment. Perhaps most crucially, this is a project-by-project financing model, with mostly small operators…