London Australian Film Festival 2007: Documentaries, Archive Films
Rolf de Heer in The Balanda and the Bark Canoes (top); Hunt Angels by Sue Maslin (bottom)
London Australian Film Festival 2007: New Features
THE DOCUMENTARIES:
This year’s documentary strand boasts a selection of eight titles. A double-bill co-presented by Dochouse explore cross culturalism in Australia. Rolf de Heer’s The Balanda and the Bark Canoes (UK Premiere) is a compelling companion piece to his Ten Canoes. “We are making a movie. The story is their story, those that live on this land, in their language, and set a long time before the coming of the Balanda, as we white people are known. For the people of the Arafura Swamp, this film is an opportunity, maybe a last chance to hold on to the old ways. For all of us, the challenges are unexpected, the task beyond anything imagined. For me, it is the most difficult film I have made, in the most foreign land I’ve been to… and it is Australia.’ Rolf de Heer.
Kanyini is an indigenous word evoking a connectedness and a deep and ancient responsibility for one’s land and community. Kanyini www.kanyini.com is a story told by an Aboriginal man, Bob Randall, member of the Yankunytjatjara people and one of the listed traditional owners of Uluru the greatest monolith in the world, where he lives in Central Australia. Based on Randall’s own personal journey and the wisdom he learnt from the old people living in the bush, Randall tells the tale of why Indigenous people are now struggling in a modern world and what needs to be done for Indigenous people to move forward. The film’s writer and narrator Bob Randall will attend a Barbican Screentalk, together with Rolf Harris who supports the film and Aboriginal rights.
First-time director Polly Watkins‘ Vietnam Nurses www.20.sbs.com.au/vietnamnurses reveals the untold stories of six Army nurses who served at the only Australian field hospital in Vietnam. Forty-three of the 50,000 Australian servicemen and women in the Vietnam War were Army Nurses. These young women, who went out to stifling Vung Tau in the 60s were prepared for a challenge but not for the extremes of danger, injury and heartbreak.
In Helen Gaynor’s Welcome 2 My Deaf World (UK Premiere) Scott and Bethany share three things: adolescence, school, and deafness. They are pupils at Victorian College of the Deaf, Australia’s first school for deaf children. The film follows them through their last few months of school as they look forward to leaving their sheltered lives and enter the wider world.
Two documentary films look at Australia’s movie-making history. A dark and dangerous episode in Australia’s cinema history which is vibrantly reanimated and reinterpreted through Sue Maslin’s award-winning Hunt Angels www.huntangels.com.au/huntangels/. Using innovative digital composite techniques never before utilised in an Australian feature film, director Alec Morgan and visual effects specialist Rose Draper blend 1930s Australia with the cinematic fantasy worlds of their imaginative main characters in what is a valentine to cinema and the mavericks who sometimes went unnoticed. In The Archive Project (European Premiere) leading Australian documentary filmmaker John Hughes completes his trilogy on Australia’s experience of the Cold War with this exploration of the Melbourne Realist film movement of the 1940s and 50s. This small group of dedicated film enthusiasts promoted an activist film culture, supporting labour movement, housing and peace campaigns. Their amazing films were crucial to the emergence of film festivals in Melbourne and Sydney.
The Story of the Kelly Gang
THE ARCHIVE FILMS:
This year’s festival includes an Archive strand which marks the centenary of the earliest feature film ever made, anywhere. The festival is showing, with live piano accompaniment by John Sweeney, the UK Premiere of the digital restoration of The Story of the Kelly Gang which was made in 1906 when most films in Europe and America consisted of two-reels. The four-reel Kelly Gang is generally regarded as the first film in the world to resemble what is now termed a feature film. Depicting the career of the notorious outlaw Ned Kelly, its success was the catalyst for an explosion in film production which made the Australian film industry one of the world’s most prolific in the period leading up to the First World War. This digital restoration of the surviving elements, totally some twenty minutes, represents the most complete version of the film in existence. Playing alongside Kelly Gang is Arthur W. Sterry’s 1921 The Life Story of John Lee: The Man They Could Not Hang and the winner of the 1954 Grand Prix Absolute at the Venice Film Festival, The Back of Beyond, one of Australia’s great classics.
The London Australian Film Festival is the only festival in Europe that dedicates its programme to Australian cinema. Year-on-year the festival brings to UK audiences the best in Australian film. This year, as in the previous two years, the selected films from the festival goes on-tour to UK wide venues.
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Tags: Classic Movies, Documentaries, Film Festivals, Hunt Angels, London Australian Film Festival, London Screenings, Rolf de Heer, Silent Films, Sue Maslin, Ten Canoes, The Balanda and the Bark Canoes, The Life Story of John Lee: The Man They Could Not Hang, The Story of the Kelly Gang
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