It looks as though Australians will receive a reasonable amount of attention on the international stage this awards season, with performances from Nicole Kidman and Joel Edgerton, as well as Mel Gibson’s locally made war pic, Hacksaw Ridge, which has netted three Golden Globe nominations. As usual, however, the best Australian films of the year were generally not the same ones wooing the glitterati in Tinseltown.
According to data from Screen Australia, a measly 16% of feature film directors in this country are women. Sadly, this top 10 list reflects that to a certain extent, though it does show female film-makers punching above their weight (three films, or 30%, were directed by women).
After last year’s record haul for Australian cinema at the box office, this year’s crop has collectively received a smaller audience share. There was much to like about Australian cinema in 2016, however, including a particularly strong lineup of documentaries. Quality docos that didn’t make this list include The Baulkham Hills African Ladies Troupe and The Animal Condition.
10. Chasing Asylum
Academy, Emmy and now Aacta award-winning film-maker Eva Orner’s detention centre exposé plays out like a compendium of shame, captivating for all the wrong reasons. The director separates herself from the political debate about whether the boats carrying asylum seekers to Australia have stopped. Her stance is they have; her remit is to examine the human cost.
Social and support workers recount stories of working at the Australian-run detention centre on Manus Island, secretly recorded footage helping set the scene. Those who are knowledgeable on the asylum seekers debate in Australia won’t discover much new information in Chasing Asylum, but to have this long and politically twisted story threaded together in a such a way – coherent, cogent, powerful – is a vital yet heart-wrenching experience.
9. Broke
Why do we look to football players to be our role models? Are we putting too much pressure on them; and what happens if they buckle under it? Steve Le Marquand delivers one of the best performances of the year as a once great former star Origins player who took a fall from grace and kept on falling. Homeless, asking for change and clutching a near-deplete goon bag, the protagonist is broke in more ways than one.
A kind elderly man tries to help him turn his life around, but will he make it? This story of (maybe) redemption is very well handled by writer/director Heath Davis who, in his feature film debut, is enormously effective at painting a protagonist you root for but are simultaneously wary of. My kingdom for a more satisfying ending: after a marvellous first two acts the last bit drifts away. Still, the journey is very much worthwhile and the film – particularly Le Marquand – will stay with you.
8. Ecco Homo
Who exactly was Peter Vanessa “Troy” Davies? What significance does he have in the Australian cultural landscape? The career of the late cross-dressing artist was etched in the post-punk haze of Melbourne in the 80s, coming to sort-of prominence around the time friend and collaborator Michael Hutchence rose to fame. This handsomely made, slightly surreal-looking documentary (executive produced by Bono and Ben Mendelsohn) answers many questions and poses many others.
Co-directors Richard Lowenstein (Dogs in Space, He Died With a Felafel in His Hand) and Lynn-Maree Milburn (In Bob We Trust, John Safran’s Race Relations) treat their subject as one giant mystery: a puzzle with pieces scattered everywhere, including across the planes of time. With interviewees reflecting mixed feelings and memories, Ecco Homo is not so much This Is Your Life as What Was Your Life and Why? The vibes feeling oddly funeral; like taking acid at a wake.
7. Remembering the Man
The late Timothy Conigrave could never have known he would one day be posthumously narrating a documentary about his relationship with the love of his life, John Caleo. In 1993, when Aids was sweeping across Australia and no effective treatment for it existed, the actor, writer and activist took part in an oral project created by the National Library of Australia.
Fast-forward two and a half decades and co-directors Nickolas Bird and Eleanor Sharpe use a beyond-the-grave Conigrave to kick off Remembering the Man. It is a moving portrait of their relationship – equal parts romantic and tragic – matched with wider exploration of social issues. The tenderness of the first act gives way to an enthralling second, exploring the local 90s gay rights movement, and a shocking third, examining the human cost of Aids in Australia.
6. Red Dog: True Blue
How do you get another Red Dog movie when (spoiler!) they killed off the pooch in the first one? A prequel, of course, set when the lovable canine was a sprightly scallywag getting up to all sorts of mischief with his young owner (Levi Miller). Back then he was actually not Red but Blue (new dog-actor Phoenix) – named after being discovered covered in paint.
In these days when Australian family films that intelligently explore light and dark elements are few and far between, the beautifully burnished Red Dog: True Blue joins a beloved pantheon that includes Storm Boy, The Silver Brumby, Babe and its massively successful predecessor. This thoughtful, entertaining origin story is underscored with a sense of Australiana that feels, well, true blue – without trading in hackneyed or cringe-inducing stereotypes.
5. Girl Asleep
Theatre-cum-cinema director Rosemary Myers must surely be tired of comparisons to Wes Anderson. And yet the gorgeous diorama-like texture of her first feature film Girl Asleep, with its homemade dollhouse-esque aesthetic, unquestionably has more than a few Anderson-isms in its kitschiness – likewise in its erratic bubblehead characters.
Halfway into this 70s-set coming-of-age story, structured around the 15th birthday party of Greta (a delightful Bethany Whitmore), the film really comes into its own, fusing the tumultuous emotions of a puberty blues protagonist with equally enigmatic lost-in-the-woods atmospheria. It’s Paul Jennings by way of the Brothers Grimm. Trippy, fun, sweet, and – despite some similarities to the idiosyncratic style of a certain somebody – refreshingly different.
4. Sherpa
Films about industrial disputes don’t get any more majestic-looking than director Jennifer Peedom’s documentary about tourism on Mount Everest and the careers of Sherpa people, who escort foreigners up the mountain. Peedom was on location in 2014 when tragedy struck and an avalanche killed 16 Sherpas (at the time the worst tragedy in Everest’s history).
The film-maker readjusted her focus, using the tragedy as means to kick-start a discussion about how and why Nepalese guides take a disproportionate amount of risk for a disproportionate share of the reward (and who profits from their endeavours). The sleety, white and blue, almost spiritual background of Everest is awe-inspiring: a mighty contrast to the ant-sized humans who visit it – bringing greed, games and political chicanery with them.
3. Hacksaw Ridge
In the thunder, roar and stink of war Mel Gibson is very much at home – at least when it comes to directing a movie. His fifth venture behind the camera tells the real-life story of a US pacifist who became a hero on the second world war battlefield. The Aacta-scooping Hacksaw Ridge is set in the US and Japan but filmed locally, deemed by the Australian Film Institute a co-production (thus eligible for this list).
The first half is a reasonably sedate affair. Its medic protagonist (Andrew Garfield) is in military training, fighting for the right to be shipped off and fed to the slaughter. The second is something else, with a gruesome attention to detail we have come to expect from Gibson the film-maker. Morality, decency and no small measure of God-loving shines through the bloodbath, which includes a visceral stretch of cinema among the best-directed war sequences so far in the new century.
2. The Daughter
Australian theatre enfant terrible Simon Stone launched his feature film career with a dramatic reworking of Henrik Ibsen’s 1888 play The Wild Duck, transplanting the setting to present-day rural New South Wales. If it seemed as though Australian cinema had exhausted its supply of family squabble dramas set in non-city locations, The Daughter applied the proverbial defibrillator and shocked the genre back to life.
An off/off the wagon alcoholic (Paul Schneider) returns to town for the marriage of his father (Geoffrey Rush) to a much younger woman. With him comes, eventually, a revelation that shocks two families. Produced by the great Jan Chapman – whose extraordinary CV includes The Piano, Lantana, The Babadook and Love Serenade – Stone’s moody drama is a great exercise in building and sustaining tension. Also an acting masterclass, with note-perfect performances from a dream cast including Miranda Otto, Odessa Young, Ewen Leslie and Sam Neill.
1. Goldstone
One-man film-making powerhouse Ivan Sen defies that old adage: “Jack of all trades and master of none.” In the best film so far in his career, a western/neo-noir hybrid set in the outback, the all-purpose auteur wrote, directed, produced, edited, composed and shot it. Talk about an overachiever.
When a filthy drunk detective (Aaron Pedersen: what an actor; what presence) arrives in the titular town looking for a missing Chinese woman, he exposes corruption and becomes a magnet for lines like “don’t rock the boat”.
This big-thinking and technically magnificent production, dripping with outback eye candy, lights up a powder keg of allegorical meaning: Goldstone is a country, not a town, and its name is Australia. Sen, part of a new wave of Indigenous Australian film-makers, mixes the 60,000 years of storytelling in his DNA with the tropes of contemporary genres – making an instant one-for-the-ages classic.
