In 1982, Peter Andrikidis, Greek, twentysomething and newly graduated from the Australian Film Television and Radio School, was watching TV with his grandfather. The show was Cop Shop, and John Orcsik (actually of Hungarian descent) was playing a Greek detective. His grandfather was blown away. A Greek cop in a show about Australians! Greeks could be Australians?
For Andrikidis this was a defining moment. He still gets emotional talking about it. At film school, he was a big fan of the social realism of Ken Loach, films that said something about the way people lived. From now on, he decided, if he did manage to get any directing work, he would at least try “to get the real world on our screens”.
The work came quickly. Ever since making his first film, tomato sauce splatter spectacular The Madman from Alcatraz, when he was 10 years old, Andrikidis had shown a desire to entertain, to achieve a common touch. Unlike many of his film school peers, he was eager to embrace the soapy world of series and serials. Six months after watching Cop Shop with his grandad, he had a gig directing the show.
Over the years Andrikidis’s CV has swelled, for the most part with projects that have a multicultural focus. That list includes: Wildside and East West 101 – police procedurals with widely diverse casts; The Straits, about a family of drug smugglers in north Queensland; and Serangoon Road, set in a detective agency in Singapore in 1965.
His new film, Alex & Eve, describes the relationship between a Lebanese Muslim woman and a Greek man, played by Richard Brancatisano and Andrea Demetriades.
Alex & Eve is interesting because it covers potentially volatile cultural territory using a conventionally frothy, romcom structure. There’s the instant attraction between this young couple, the seemingly insurmountable obstacles (family resistance and plans for her arranged marriage to someone else). The situation looks like it has reached point of no return hopelessness, and as per the formula, Alex and Eve run off together.
And there’s some fumbling sex in a car. Andrikidis says there was “a lot of discussion about this scene and it wasn’t taken lightly – but it was true to the characters, who are adults after all and in their 30s.” The scene makes logical sense in the narrative and is certainly more implied than explicit. But Andrikidis is watching to see how reactions play out.
Andrew Jakubowicz is professor of sociology at the University of Technology, Sydney, an expert on race, media and identity, and a longtime observer of Andrikidis. “If you fail to represent ethnic diversity in popular narratives, there can only be problems,” Jakubowicz says.
In Australia, he points out, ethnic diversity is better represented on cooking (if not dating) shows than in screen storytelling. While that’s not always the cast, he contends that in film and television drama, “particularly with the scares around Islam and so on, the mainstream’s got even more jumpy about including people who are diverse.”
Jakubowicz says: “New arrivals are given a script, already written for them. As time goes on, everybody needs to be able to put in their two cents worth.”
Writer-director-producer Tony Ayres, whose own work has often had a multicultural focus, has long admired Andrikidis. “His work is always about excellence, which is the best argument for why multicultural stories are worth telling,” he says.
And that excellence is reflected in the swag of awards that Andrikidis has bagged over the years, including five AFI/Aacta awards for best direction and a centenary medal for services to film, television and Australian society.
He has encountered some resistance to portraying Australia’s cultural diversity on screen over the years but in the end, he has mostly prevailed. “I have presented reasoned arguments and people have listened,” he says matter-of-factly. And to this day he remains convinced that “it is important for all Australians with diverse ethnic backgrounds to see themselves represented.”
