/ARTS WEEKLY/FILM-AUSTRALIA: Relationships Star in Sydney Fest

By Neena Bhandari Reprint | | Print |

Neena Bhandari

SYDNEY, Jun 24 2003 (IPS) - A full fortnight’s worth of films screened during the 50th Sydney Film Festival would be impossible to categorise thematically, but explorations of human relationships and women stood out among this year’s 210 entries.

Canadian director Wiebke von Carolsfeld’s ‘Marion Bridge’ identified family ties and the mingling of resentment and adoration. Australian writer-director Sandra Sciberras featured her ‘Deeper Than Blue’, based around a 40-something nurse who has lost her mother and is struggling to cope with her grief-stricken, demented and demanding father.

These were modest stories that drew in appreciative audiences.

As festival director Gayle Lake commented, ”A majority of the films at some level examine the notion of family, not just blood relations, but a sense of communality and relationship to each other. When one brings in the personal, the political is around us.”

Family and relationship were not marked out as festival themes, but most entries for the festival examined the notion of family. ”While war and peace are still an important concern for people,” Lake said, ”it is fair to say that there is a real focus on the more personal consequences of the global state. Interpersonal relationships in particular are thrown under the microscope.”

Over the festival’s two weeks Jun. 6-20, 2003 – over 100,000 visitors got to peer through that microscope at entries from 38 countries. The festival is one of Australia’s longest-running cultural events and in the last 50 years, what began as an annual gathering at Sydney University has screened 6,000 films from every film-producing country in the world.

But again, it was films like ‘Family Life’, by British director Ken Loach, and Bengali film-maker Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s ‘Manda Meyer Upakhyan (A Tale Of A Naughty Girl)’ that commanded attention.

‘Family Life’ is an intimate tragedy and a sharp indictment of society. Loach had once said that families were important in his films because that is where the most drama happens in our lives – that they launch you into the world and form you.

Dasgupta’s film examines a young girl’s overwhelming need to escape her provincial life and tawdry destiny that awaits her as the daughter of a prostitute. Set in 1969, it contrasts the travails of the girl, named Lati, with the technological victory symbolised in the moon landing.

”Lati is a big hope for us,” said Dasgupta. ”What happens in this film can happen anywhere in the world. The intolerance and animosity growing within ourselves today is dangerous.”

Those are responses that cinematographer Martha Ansara knows well. She recalled how she had cried on the steps of the Sydney Town Hall before shooting a demonstration. ”You were made to feel as though you were from Mars,” she said. ”It wasn’t easy to be walking around with a camera on your shoulders.”

With the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s came the revival of Australian films. A group of young women, including Ansara, decided to make films about their own condition. They formed the Sydney Women’s Film Group and the Feminist Filmmakers.

”We worked collectively as there was an enormous amount of resistance,” said Ansara. ”We started making demands on existing institutions, determined to bring social change and with it economic and political change.”

Since those years of redefining film in Australia and the contribution of women to film, Ansara has directed prize-winning social documentaries, experimental films and a feature, but it is her work as a cinematographer that is closest to her heart.

The alternative film movement also sprang up at around the same time and some, like Gillian Armstrong, made it into the mainstream quite quickly. She became the first Australian woman director to make it internationally with her landmark feature, ‘My Brilliant Career’, which was to prove prophetic about her own career as she went on to make some major Hollywood productions.

Jane Scott is another product of this movement. She began her film career in distribution and production with the British Film Institute and recalled how difficult it was to work in the male-dominated British film industry – it was full of older men who trivialised her viewpoints.

”In Australia, it was a new industry that was starting to grow and I was in the vanguard of that,” said Scott. ”The stories behind most of my films portray life in some way that is important to me.”

She is deeply interested in family relationships, especially, she said, ”the parent-child relationship that is the foundation of our lives”. She finds that many people have had bad relationships with parents and with an honest story, one can touch the heart of the audience.

That abiding interest is perhaps best seen in her award-winning ‘Shine’, which deals with family relationships very meaningfully. The film won an Oscar for best actor in 1997, an Australian Writers’ Guild award for best original screenplay in 1996 and the Critics’ Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1996.

Judging from the audience response, the impromptu theme that emerged at this year’s festival went down well. Among the short features, for example, ‘The Forest’ is a contemporary drama about a woman caught in a relationship she no longer feels happy in.

An Australian entry directed by Jo Kennedy, it follows a woman on her tenth wedding anniversary as she finds herself at a crossroads. In the course of an evening she visits the people closest to her in a bid to find herself, not realising that each of them have their little secrets. ‘The Forest’ is a story about families, love and the nature of intimacy.

Many Australian women today are powerful voices – like festival director Lake, who has been a distributor and exhibitor. As directors, producers or otherwise, they are deciding the kind of representation women have on screen.