00:00:45
S1: Welcome to behind the scenes, my name's Chris Thompson, and each week as we talk about the arts and culture across Melbourne, across Victoria and across the country, we acknowledge the Boomerang and Warren Gerry Peoples of the Island Nation, the traditional custodians of the land on which we make this show. We pay our respects to their ancestors and elders past, present and emerging. And remember that they are part of the longest continuing culture in the world. We're back to South Australia for the start of this week's show in Adelaide correspondent Geoff Cobham. He's going to catch us up on what's been happening locally before introducing us to prolific and multi award winning playwright Finnegan Brookmeyer. Then there's something a little bit different coming from Arena Theatre in Bendigo. It's a community picnic under the stars and a screening of By, a film directed by Eliza Hall, featuring four South Sudanese performers who live in Bendigo, one of whom is Kuhnen Thorne, who's here to tell us about the event. Meanwhile, we're back in the cinemas and just in time for the British Film Festival. We'll catch up with festival director Kim Fatalis before Mark Gracey drops by to chat about a few of the films in the festival's extensive programme. They're all on tonight's edition. A behind the scenes with me Chris Thompson right here on Vision Australia radio. Well, it's the second show of the month, which means we must be in Adelaide with artistic director of theatre Jeff Goldblum, welcome back to the show.
00:02:16
S2: Hurray! I'm here in Adelaide in the middle of the Asia Festival. Oh, she's an absolute delight.
00:02:26
S1: So are you? Are you working on it or are you just a happy punter?
00:02:31
S2: Just an everyday punter. I am. I went to a fabulous show called Double Delicious, which certainly was doubly delicious because in between the five acts we got for a five course meal, so fantastic. Basically, imagine the best Asian cooks telling you stories about their lives whilst they cook, and then you get the food they have talked about. Wow. In between the performances.
00:03:03
S1: Wow.
00:03:04
S2: It was a fantastic experience, and the finale was Elizabeth Chong and 90 year old chef who has been like the mother of Chinese cooking in Australia and who told us that her father invented the dim scheme as we know it in Australia, which I really chuffed about. Yeah. Well, I hope she means the the way she's
00:03:33
S1: talking to Melbourne, Dave Sims and are not the ones I used to sit beside the Chicco rolls in the bay.
00:03:39
S2: I was not sure. I hope will.
00:03:45
S1: I seem to recall that she's actually been on the show talking about that very event that happened here at the Abbotsford Convert a year or so ago. So, you know, you don't get everything first.
00:03:57
S2: No, certainly not all Guns N Roses.
00:04:03
S1: Oh well, have you got any tickets for Guns N
00:04:04
S2: Roses is coming here next Tuesday. You know, that makes me think that the pandemic is over
00:04:14
S1: or that we've just completely given up. Yeah.
00:04:19
S2: Oh, yeah, that was an absolute delight to go to that show, and then the very next night, I went to a a feast for the For The Eyes and Ears, which was a show called Rahu. I'm probably not pronouncing that correctly, which you may have seen as well. I'm not sure it's a fantastic shadow puppet show.
00:04:41
S1: No, I haven't.
00:04:42
S2: An Indonesian up Asian artist called Chu Mahdi, and he tells the most profound and beautiful story through shadow cut out. The stage is set with two overhead projectors like the old fashioned ones. We had a soup and that that's all. And then there's four musicians who are playing a variety of the customers, and there's no electronic music they can see. And that basically they it's nonverbal and they tell the story of everything that had everything from the scene that has interacted with the island of Indonesia. Oh, wow. So first of all, is fruit that gets washed up and turned into into these other plants and food that colonized the land. And then it's all the different sorts of traders who come to the land and it just goes on and on. It's a massive scale of how it goes through the history of the island, as seen from the islands point of view of what the sea has bought them.
00:05:51
S1: And what venues are playing
00:05:53
S2: that that was in the state theatre?
00:05:55
S1: Oh, lovely.
00:05:56
S2: Yeah, it was great. It was quite intimate and the music was just delightful, so playful and powerful. And just to have those musicians right there with you. It was a most extraordinary performance. I really, really, you know, it's one I'll never forget that experience of being these incredibly detailed cut out and the people operating them because you got to see the operation of it all. And they were sort of animate things and they would slide them from one projected to the other. There was at times three people operating them and they had 300 different slides each to put on, which were just bits of cardboard that had been cut out by the artists themselves.
00:06:37
S1: So you see when you see a show like that because you're someone that works, you know, right on the edge of a lot of technology, certainly in sound and lighting. Yeah. And we've talked about that before. When we talked about your show, The Lighthouse, it was such a beautiful kind of use of really cutting edge technology. But when you see a show like that, is that a really grounding thing for someone like you that wants to do? I guess that beautiful, delicate handmade work, but use the tools that we've got available to us to your experience.
00:07:18
S2: Absolutely profoundly there reminder that the analog is still the power behind all the digital as well. You know, like my work, basically, I'm doing I'm basically bringing my my analog skills from the 70s and 80s into the new technology. It's why I'm able to use the new technology well, because I have an understanding and a love of the analog. Yeah, and seeing that play out in front of you, like that's the things that people love, like the things that people love in life are. We give them a string with a light on the end and they sit around and it's makes a line of life like that's something that is primitive in all of that. And I think Shadow Shadow Play is also a very primitive thing and was probably one of the very first forms of theater. You know, you would have made shadows in the cave from the firelight, I imagine, you know, they're there things that are even built into us, and we respond to them in a very primitive way. And yeah, it is really reaffirming to be reminded about the simplicity of design and the the the old kind of keep it simple, stupid, which also which also
00:08:34
S1: happens to
00:08:38
S2: be coming to Adelaide on November the 24th in the entertainment centre. I mean, you have
00:08:43
S1: all the good shows, he said. Guns N Roses, who says Adelaide is stuck in the 80s? Sorry, I lied. That was unkind of me to say.
00:08:56
S2: But prove it.
00:08:59
S1: Yeah, just called. Oh God, no, you've got another one.
00:09:02
S2: Oh, the other big thing we're excited about is we have the festival of orchestras. Oh, thank you. Raise funding the the AFO have put together six nights in the Adelaide Showground. Where every night is a different, magical spectacular, from a classical spectacular to Camino Borana tonight on Broadway. And the angels are playing, and it was the Ministry of Sound. Oh, well, most, most massive undertaking. You know, it's really ambitious and that's that's an exciting thing which would never be able to have ever done without the, you know, thank you cut of it, I suppose. We had funding bubble that has enabled the ASO to make such a public outpouring of music for everyone.
00:09:57
S1: It's like. It sounds like a fabulous event, but for a very small moment when you first mentioned it, I had this image of like a dozen orchestras, all in the Showgrounds, all at the same time.
00:10:10
S2: Like Battle of the Bands,
00:10:11
S1: Battle of the Bands. I. Jeff Cobb. And this is our last Adelaide check for 2021. But I think we're going to pick it up again in the new year.
00:10:27
S2: I would love to. That would be great fun and it'll be a whole new brand new world by then.
00:10:32
S1: Oh, it will. So we will catch up again in the new year. But in the meantime,
00:10:39
S2: I have a special,
00:10:40
S1: as I say to you, Thank you so much for your Adelaide stories in the last few months. Who is the artist that you're going to introduce us to this month? Yes.
00:10:50
S2: Well, this is a delightful man who I have done since he was a young man when he used to be a sort of wandering poet around the city and he would emcee events. And he was a little powerhouse around Town, who has now become a powerhouse writer around the entire world. The most the prolific writer of stories for children. And I think when you talk to him, you'll find the ridiculous number of plays he often has in production at any one time around the world, and he's a fantastic success story. He Nathalie Boy, who spent a lot of time recently and has even in fact living in Adelaide, and he has written plays for all of us and we've all, you know, done been lucky to work with him on many different shows, and I'm sure he'll have lots of great news for you.
00:11:44
S1: Fantastic. And his name is
00:11:48
S2: Finnegan Crook of mine.
00:11:50
S1: Well, Jeff Cogburn, always lovely to talk to you. We'll catch up again in the new year. And welcome to the show, Finnegan Crocodile.
00:11:59
S2: Thank you very much. Lovely to chat.
00:12:02
S1: Now, if I was to read out a list of every play you've written and then a list of every award that those plays have won and then a list of every country in the world where those plays have been performed. I think we would have to extend the show into next week. You are the most amazingly prolific writer. How is that? What is it about you that just means that you just keep writing and it's not. It's not hack work. They're really good place.
00:12:38
S2: Oh, thank you. The nice thing about chatting in this way is you can't. So I'm a bit of a blocker.
00:12:44
S1: So, oh, we can hear that blush like we could hear those red cheeks.
00:12:52
S2: I think I've honestly been very lucky. I think it's been this lovely, serious the Stepping Stones, whereby one show that's been written has happened to have a nice touring life and then the places it's reach to have mean that it's been encountered by various producers or directors or or actors who then become friends. And we have our own facts about work and kind of one thing leads to another. And and yeah, over a period of time, over enough years, it's become this. This is just this lovely point of critical mass whereby enough plays are going on around the world and then being seen that that it means that yes, they can. They can be having lived lives far and wide, and I and I sit back and hear about the fun journeys they're going on, which feels really lovely.
00:13:37
S1: When did you know that you could write?
00:13:41
S2: I knew that I loved writing and that I wanted to write from a very, very young age. But it was, yeah, being a avid, hungry reader from a very young age and then wondering about what words people could pour into the world and and going through these formative exercises of trying that and then kind of through very simple call and response. That's like doing stand up comedy or doing performance poetry, hearing the effect the words could have in the immediate so. So if I uttered this line, this is the life that comes in response or if this one is is sadder and more contemplative, maybe I can see the reactions on people's faces going, okay, this is the potency of words when they land in the right order. You can. You can. Yeah, you can be conveying emotion and making one person feel a sentiment, but your feeling and and so it was really an exercise of just building upon that, and I'm still 100 per cent learning. It's still an ongoing quest that will never, ever, ever end. And I still write a whole lot of deadline, which kind of fell flat. But but within those are, yeah, those lovely occasional narratives or monologues or characters created who for some reason seem to resonate with an audience. And that's always that's always just a pleasure. It's just lovely.
00:15:04
S1: That way you've described it. Plus, of course, Jeff Cockburn's description of you as this young wandering poet around. It sounds like you write from inside the story rather than outside the story.
00:15:20
S2: Yes, true. I think that's very true. I think, yeah, that's a lovely observation. I I'm not frightened. I've never trained as a writer. I don't know much about the craft of writing, I would argue, other than, yes, being this, this this reader who just loves reading. And so you kind of cosmetically take on nice narratives in that way. But it's all really about the exercise of honesty, of kind of inventing a character or encountering a character and then trying to write them as truthfully and faithfully as possible and testing each line for rigor along the way kind of hearing as the text is falling onto the page or the computer. Whether this seems like a sentiment they would embrace, whether they would articulate the world in that way and an editing in real time. And and you just keep working until it feels tangible, until they feel like a three dimensional version of the character. And then you find some other characters to kind of smash them up against or worlds or scenarios to exist in. But you're right, it's very much a sense of being embedded in the thing that I need to say or the tasks they need to undertake. And then just trying to go along for the ride. And it really does often feel as indulgent as that. But you know, I'm just riding the coattails of these characters who are who are way more interesting than me, and it's lovely.
00:16:45
S1: You described yourself, I think, as a hungry reader. And you've also mentioned that you did some stand up and you know, we know you were wondering poet. And so at some point you must have decided not novelist, not stand up, not poet. Playwright. Yeah. What was the point at which you went playwright? That's pretty much that's what's going on. My tax return
00:17:12
S2: is. Yes, it's a it's a funny question to be think about now because I'm kind of I'm deciding that in this moment, too, like after after years of really focusing very heavily on the player. I think I'm writing a screenplay and I am writing a novel at the moment, and I am rediscovering the pleasure of writing poetry. So so I'm I'm kind of discovering breath again, but definitely for those interim years and continuing on in these current years, I I enjoy the immediacy of theatre and I enjoy the the amalgam of a collective exercise and a personal exercise that sense of sitting in your own seat in the theater and being in total to have a very kind of emotionally indulgent, contemplative, cathartic experience sitting by yourself in a theater and hearing a narrative and then also being part of the collective one, being part of an audience that laughs together or, you know, set that year together or whatever it is that I think there are there are only so many moments when when those two things can kind of come together in a really nice symbiosis. And I and I think theatre, for whatever magic reason is one of those things you you're allowed to be part of the collective and you're allowed to to be, um. Yeah, going on your very own intimate journey. And it's I think it's a wonderful, wonderful medium.
00:18:39
S1: I've had discussions before with, you know, really great writers of young adult fiction, really great writers of theatre for young people, all those kind of categories. Yeah. And it's really common that in those discussions, what you discover is that that's how the work gets program, but it's not how it's written. It's not as this is a work for teenagers. It's written as this is a piece of theatre. Do you fall into that category?
00:19:12
S2: Hundred percent, yeah, and you're right, I think that most of the discussions I have with my colleagues and peers and mentors and pride sees us all kind of singing from the same hymn book and and yeah, I think artistically one has to do that just because you like in in selecting a part of the population that the work it's or you're on in an unspoken way, kind of naming a part of the population that it's not for. And I think that's a problematic exercise. I think the making of art should be as all encompassing as possible. And so, so yes, maybe it falls under the the T.Y. umbrella from a production perspective. But but in terms of who it is for and who it who was allowed to access it? I think that should be as broad as possible. And and also just that lovely sense of economy, the writers I love the most and the books I love the most. You know, they say so much more with less. And to me, that is the real potency of children's theatre is that, you know, it conveys big emotions and big landscapes of big, complex issues with comparatively simple language. And in 50 minutes, as opposed to in three hours and often with only a couple of actors, you know, because of the economic impositions as opposed to a full cast. And I think that those are all actually really healthy things, but that sense of how to how to construct a world or convey a big narrative with with tighter sentences and and more accessible metaphors. And and, you know, a landscape that can be accessed by somebody with a smaller vocabulary and a larger one. But emotionally, the the work is no less demanding.
00:20:59
S1: I've seen a number of your plays, I haven't seen all. Whatever it is, 100 or more that you've written. But then I have seen enough and it's often it often strikes me that you sit in the theater and you feel like you're looking at the world sort of sideways through a slightly distorted lens. Things like logic and naturalism. I'm going to say the enemy of a writer like you do, you need to be free to interpret the world in whatever way makes sense to you and then to the audience.
00:21:39
S2: Yeah, I think it's I think it's more of the latter notion. I I don't feel threatened or challenged by any style or genre or form. And then I think naturalism, you know, you can you can wholly embed an audience in a very realistic moment of of two people encountering each other in the life. And it feels like it's taken out of the real world and that 100 percent fine. And that really works for some scenes. But but when it feels like an imposition, when it feels like this character can only feel can only convey the next stage of their revolution by growing wings of fly, then I feel I should let them grow and fly. Or, you know, when when they need to split into multiple people because there are different sides to this complex personality and one human won't won't quite provide all of those all of those angles in a 50 minute introduction to the audience. Then I will make them three triplet sisters who are left in the woods, you know, like so. So yes, I have written naturalism and entire plays a bit before, but I yeah, I don't from my own selfish reasons, for the artistic reasons and for the audiences reasons. I don't ever want to feel inhibited by sticking to one form where another or a bastardization of a might might tell the story better. Is that okay? Does that make sense?
00:23:07
S1: Yes, that's okay, food, you can do that
00:23:10
S2: right
00:23:13
S1: now in Melbourne. We're about to see a play of yours, which is an adaptation of Alison Lester's Magic Beach, which has just been nominated for What You 112th Augie Award. Congratulations. What's the difference for you to approach a project that's coming entirely from your imagination of in Cucamonga? I play this is this has to actually make sense in terms of people who love that book.
00:23:46
S2: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I think it's that I think it's the acknowledgement that the audience you're about to encounter already has a relationship with the material. And it's not about precept. It's not about kind of taking them off on your own flights of fancy. It's about trying to in some small way, three dimensional way emulate the experience they have when sitting down to that same narrative. So. So it's it's definitely a more kind of considered editing exercise than I've done before. Often I just let myself write and let the characters take whatever form they make. This was more scrutiny all the way through of going, Okay, how is this deviating from what I believe to be Alison Nestor's intent? How would these kids on a beach following in the footsteps, the sandy footsteps of of the one that we find in the book? And for me, really what it was about with this, I had a big thing and I decide it's about just finding the the dramatic hook because there are many beautiful things in that book, but there isn't really conflict. So much it is. It's such a lovely embracing world like a beach holiday that you could sit in. And um. And I realized that, yeah, I needed to find what the what the little battle or turmoil in it might be. So I've got this. This must be older sibling who's deciding whether she can still have the imagination of her younger ones, which is what occurs in the book or whether she has to grow up now and the days of imagining are over. And and so it's kind of within the happiness of the other moments in the play. It's also watching her struggle with that and allowing the audience at whatever age they might be right up to adult to do the same.
00:25:37
S1: Do you ever say no to a project?
00:25:41
S2: Yes, I do, I do, um, I I. Yeah. Oh, I don't know how to say this, really. I I if I feel like the the kind of the commercial imperatives of a project may be more at the forefront of America's mind than the artistic one, then I'll probably politely step away from that or suggest somebody else. Um, if I feel like there's there's a. I don't know an imbalance to me doing the work, if it's a voice that has to be articulated by somebody else, maybe somebody who in real life is closer to that character or to that circumstance or to that issue than I think it is, it's right to step back and allow that role to be filled by someone else. And sometimes, if it's just the pragmatics of time, and if I feel that I can't do a good job because my play is a bit too full at the moment, then I then I will say probably for those three reasons.
00:26:40
S1: Yeah, thing we could keep talking for ages, I suspect. Oh yeah, I bet you. And it would be quite fascinating to do. So maybe we'll get you back on the show another time to continue this conversation. All right. But it's been great to talk to you, and here you kind of talk about the process and the way you exist within the writing that you create. The plays I've seen have been fantastic took us for the Augie's for the stage. Thank you very much. And thank you so much for being on the show.
00:27:20
S2: Not a complete pleasure. Thank you to you. And thanks to Jeff for the intro and and yeah, no, no. It's a.
00:27:31
S1: Well, Arena Theatre Company based in Bendigo, has been on the show a couple of times before talking about their work, which predominantly happens with young people and often in schools, but also at festivals and in theatre spaces. But this coming weekend, this coming Friday and Saturday, they have a slightly different project that they have been working on with Bendigo venues and events. The event is called by and one of the performers in the event is Kunene Thorne, who is on the line. Welcome to the show, Kunene.
00:28:06
S2: Thank you.
00:28:08
S1: Now, this is an unusual event because it's a performance, but it's a filmed performance of a South Sudanese group that you belong to that has settled in Bendigo, is that right?
00:28:21
S2: Yeah, that's true.
00:28:23
S1: So tell me about Tell Me About Bae and what the word means.
00:28:29
S2: So by the meaning behind it to whom? Do you call your home by in our language Dinka? So it's been a program that we started working on it. Two years of a foot, over two years now. Wow. And yeah, it's been going great. We started it thinking just a little group of static starting to sing and teach ourselves how to sing or do anything. And it came up later on that we can perform at events or anywhere. And then we did two performance in Bendigo here. And the biggest one was in Castlemaine, which was in much of the Castlemaine Festival. And after that, we were meant to do another one this year, in November. In October, sorry. But then because of COVID due to COVID, we decided to do a video like a film. So we did a film for that one, which is a new experience for us. None of us in the in the film have never done any type of film before in our life, so that was our first one. And it's been amazing so far since we went for it. They've been great.
00:29:53
S1: And this isn't just putting a video camera in front of the performance and recording that and then showing it, it's actually got a really terrific film creative team behind it, Eliza, Hull and Jack. Why the directors and award winning cinematographer Kieran Watson beneath behind the camera. How long did they work with you on how to make a live performance look the way it should look when it's on film?
00:30:30
S2: So I can say it was just for two days. But planning it was like four weeks ago. So we planned it for like weeks and decide like what we can do, and we plan our locations position where we can build this, this type of um. Events or this type of thing that we can do in the life. But then it took us weeks and ideas as well. EV1 ideas was in there was included. And then when we decided to do their their film, it was just for two days, right? They found it.
00:31:13
S1: And the the group that's performing is you and three others. Yes. So tell me about the other three.
00:31:22
S2: OK, so it's me. Martha could do an ideal on it and then young might.
00:31:31
S1: And you're quite young. All of you as young as 14 and up to 22. Yes. How long have you all been working together?
00:31:45
S2: Since 2019. Wow. Yes.
00:31:51
S1: And is it the just the four of you that work together or is there a larger group in the community that you interact with?
00:31:57
S2: No. Used to be a larger community, so used to be fostered in Esquire for women. And then later on, he drove down to the Golf one.
00:32:12
S1: And when did you come to Bendigo?
00:32:15
S2: I came to Bendigo in 2018 much.
00:32:20
S1: And is there a strong South Sudanese community in Bendigo?
00:32:26
S2: Not very strong hands in Melbourne. Yeah.
00:32:29
S1: Mm hmm. And so describe the performance for me are these dancers that are telling stories in the way you perform.
00:32:41
S2: Yes. There is yet each one of us in the film are telling our story.
00:32:50
S1: And you tell the story through dance and song.
00:32:55
S2: Through dense and bone is good authority. But through telling it is the one that is our story. So we say the stories in the anchor. Well, everyone.
00:33:11
S1: And when you've performed at things like Kesselman Festival, are these generally outdoor performances or do you perform in theatres?
00:33:20
S2: It was outdoor outdoor.
00:33:24
S1: And so this coming Friday and Saturday, it's a picnic event, even though it's I presume you've got a big screen outdoors and people will sit like they do it outdoor cinemas all over the place. Yes. Are your performances usually in this lovely kind of under the stars sort of format? Or are they often during the day?
00:33:48
S2: The often during the day.
00:33:50
S1: Yeah. So that would make. So that make this weekend quite special.
00:33:56
S2: Yes, that's true, that's true. Cause will be at like eight p.m.. Yeah, that yeah.
00:34:03
S1: And people will bring a picnic and some rugs and chairs and sit around and talk to each other. And then at some point, everyone's focus will turn to the screen and we'll see your performance of bye. But then there's more to it, isn't there? After the performance, I think you're going to sing live, aren't you?
00:34:22
S2: Yes, we are. Yeah. After the performance, it would be displayed on the wall and after that would sing live and we would dance as well.
00:34:33
S1: Oh, fantastic.
00:34:34
S2: Yeah. And we will do some speeches like after the knees acknowledgement. We'll do that as well.
00:34:43
S1: Fantastic. Tell me about the space. This is the space is connected to the The Burrow Theatre, which is the beautiful theatre space in Bendigo, but it's a garden setting outside the theatre.
00:35:02
S2: Yeah, it's um, it's a little garden that is behind the theatre. At Bendigo Senior. So it's behind it's behind a lumber theater somewhere there.
00:35:18
S1: Lovely. So the event is this Friday and Saturday. Yes. It'll probably still be a bit chilly at night, won't it? So people can rack up, but it's bring a picnic, bring a blanket. It's a free event. People are not paying for the tickets, but you still have to register. You still have to say I'm coming. And book a free ticket, which people can do, either through the Arena Theatre Company website or through the Alhambra Boro website. Sounds like a beautiful event, konan. Yeah. It must also be exciting. You've been in lockdown quite a lot this year. Two, Haven't you?
00:36:04
S2: Yeah.
00:36:06
S1: Well, this will this be the first time that you've performed live since the lockdowns ended?
00:36:13
S2: Yes, that's the first time you
00:36:16
S1: have very exciting.
00:36:18
S2: Very.
00:36:19
S1: So we get to see the performance that you would have done in October up on the screen. And then we get to see a performance that the four of you will do live. Yes, it's it's a very exciting event. I'm really pleased that Arena Theatre Company have been able to get involved in this. I hope it goes very well. Let's keep our fingers crossed for good weather on Friday and Saturday. Otherwise, you you'll have to run inside the theatre if it rains.
00:36:50
S2: I agree. I agree. And just to add, yeah, the location for the performance. Yup. Is there area at a lumber theatre? It is always. No, not. The I think it's called culture sculpture garden,
00:37:09
S1: oh, the Culture Garden, which is behind the Alhambra Theatre,
00:37:13
S2: yeah. Is the grass between the two heritage bellowing.
00:37:20
S1: Fantastic. And of course, that's in Bendigo. Yeah. Couldn't you tell? It's been lovely to talk to you. I hope this coming weekend is glorious weather, but nice and dark so people can see the film well. Yes, good. Good luck for it.
00:37:36
S2: All right, thank you very much. It was good to talk to you.
00:37:44
S1: Well, Kim Fatalis is the national program manager for Palace Cinemas. Clearly, it's a job that doesn't take up enough of his time because he's also director of the British Film Festival, which is back on real screens in real cinemas with audiences sitting in seats. Welcome to the show, Kim.
00:38:04
S2: Thank you, Chris.
00:38:06
S1: You must be pretty excited to actually have bodies in the space.
00:38:11
S2: Yeah, it's been a long journey. The last 18 months and you know, we're incredibly excited that we opened our cinemas down in Victoria just over a week ago, and at one stage we weren't sure whether the British festival will be able to go ahead. So we'd actually be delighted by week and fingers crossed that everything would work. And thankfully it did. And we've got a great festival on our screens. You have. Yes, I think it's our strongest festival yet, and it's it's, you know, packed with absolute, you know, quality British cinema
00:38:49
S1: when you've got the spectre of lockdowns and pandemic sitting on your shoulder. How much harder is it to program for something that? There's probably a little voice going. It might not happen.
00:39:05
S2: Look, we saw that with the unfortunately with the Melbourne Film Festival, but they pulled an incredible amount of work into their festival and, you know, had to be an online festival. And you know, there was that fear that we would be able to, you know, be on screen. But we were very, very hopeful, constantly looking at our numbers, looking at forecasts and with the latest bye week, which, you know, was a kind of a safety net. And thankfully, it all worked out. We got there in the end. But it did give me plenty of time to see, you know, a lot of movies at home over the lockdown.
00:39:41
S1: Now we're going to talk about some of the films in the programme in just a moment. But can you just tell me a little bit about the seven from the 70s because I really love that line up?
00:39:54
S2: Yeah, it look. They say it's one of my favourite periods from, you know, British cinema. It was in 1971, in particular, was a ground breaking year for British films. In a sense, that ship had really stifled the film industry for decades and that it was finally losing its loosening its grip in that period, and that it ushered in that newfound freedom in cinema. And some of those films that we've selected in the festival are still controversial, even by today's standards. I mean, A Clockwork Orange and Straw Dogs, you know, just, you know, wonderful films.
00:40:30
S1: Do you feel that festivals like these have a sort of responsibility to new generations to put them in touch with these sort of iconic films? I suspect that you like me saw a lot of these films in their first release, and they had quite an impact on me. I know some of these films films like Straw Dogs and Clockwork Orange. Is that a role of a festival like this to go? Don't just see what's happening now, but touch base with things that are the foundations.
00:41:07
S2: I look, I think we have to really look at our history to be able to move forward without, you know, our film sensibility. And I think it's really important for festivals to showcase these absolute classics on the big screen the way that the in the filmmakers had originally intended. And you know, these films, as I said, you know, by today's standards, they're still, you know, brilliant pieces of filmmaking. And every year I get incredibly excited about putting together the retrospective part of me as the British Film Festival. And, you know, thankfully, I was able to secure Clockwork Orange this year, which is a new 4K restoration. And the film looks absolutely stunning and just the lighting in the film and the the costumes and everything so experienced that on the big screen, you don't get that at home.
00:42:02
S1: Hmm. The festivals around the country kicked off on the 3rd of November in Sydney. Melbourne, of course, kicked off on Friday night with the Duke, which we'll talk about in a moment. And runs until the 1st of December. Canberra Canberra's underway. Brisbane is underway, Adelaide is underway, Perth is underway. Byron Bay is underway. Just good old Melbourne that's been behind everything for the last years. It's is is the last one to get going. What's this? Is the film. This is the question that you can never answer. But what's the film in the program that you're most excited that you're able to present?
00:42:50
S2: Oh, look, I can't go past Belfast in my role at Palace. I'm just so fortunate to see so many wonderful films. However, when I see an absolute gem of a film, it really reignites my passion. And this is this film is it's quite spectacular. It's a very, very moving film. It moves me enormously. It's a it's Kenneth brand. It's almost a love letter to his hometown of Belfast. It's shot in beautiful, stunning black and white. And there's a lot of buzz about this film that will feature very heavily in the Academy Awards next year. And I I thoroughly agree it's it's just a masterful piece of work and incredible performances, and in the direction of Kenneth Branagh is just incredible, and it's basically it's almost historic, the semi-autobiographical story, but it's just a beautiful piece of filmmaking.
00:43:49
S1: Well, I have to say I'm looking forward to that, but I'm also looking forward to the new Edgar Wright film, which which I think it's been a little. Coming for those of us that have been in lockdown, but I know you're you're backed up with a whole lot of things to do so. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us, Kim. And I think a congratulations in order. Are you leaving Palace at the end of this year?
00:44:15
S2: I'm actually retiring from my role at the end of the year. I just thought it was time to spend a little bit more time with my family. However, I will be certainly working in the background with Palace, assisting the new programming director and just helping the company moving forward with my experience and lots of the industry.
00:44:37
S1: Fantastic. Well, congratulations on your 30 years at Palace. Congratulations on this year's British Film Festival and Mark Gracey and I are now going to talk about a few of the films we've already seen. Kim Fatalis, thanks for being on the show.
00:44:51
S2: Thank you.
00:45:11
S1: Well, my Gracey, you have seen some of the British film festival program that I've seen
00:45:17
S3: that I have, that I have sung
00:45:19
S1: that I've just been talking to him about them. And as I mentioned to him, I have seen the Duke there opening night film, which you haven't. But it's Roger Michel film who sadly died earlier this year, Notting Hill and Tea with the Dames. He also directed that great documentary with. Oh yes, I should be dead to Maggie Smith and two or three years ago, the Duke probably is a bit more time with the dames than not you. It's it's set in the 60s. It's about a taxi driver called Kempton Bunton, played by Jim Broadbent, who is a social reformer. He's got this bee in his bonnet that pensioners shouldn't have to pay television licences, and coincidentally, the government is doing that old one. Coincidentally, the government has just spent $140000 buying a Goya painting of the Duke of Wellington. And so the painting gets stolen from the National Gallery really happened only time anything's ever been stolen, both from the National Gallery, and he tries to ransom it off to raise the money to pay for television licences for all the old age pensions. And meanwhile, his marriage is under a little bit of stress to his. He's his wife, played by Helen Mirren. And so it's a kind of.
00:46:47
S3: And as Harry Potter appear. No, I mean, Jim Broadbent
00:46:52
S1: got off to kind of Harry Potter. So it's it's kind of a sweet and gentle kind of it actually feels feels like a film made in the period of time when the film is set in the 60s. So it's with anything with Jim Broadbent, Helen Mirren is worth seeing. It is, as I say, it's a throwback. It is a bit of a throwback film. There's a couple of films which are the last appearances wrote to Michelle. As I said, this was his last film, the last performance by Kelly Preston, who died on Travoltas. That's right. Sadly, she's in off the rails, which is about four three old friends and a friend of theirs dies. But people like the Big Chill of the South, I will get the phone call and the the dead friend has left them.
00:47:42
S3: Our look. Judi Dench is in it. Yeah, yeah. Where does she get the time?
00:47:46
S1: Blink and you'll miss it. And they head off on a train across Europe to visit a festival that they all promised they'd go to
00:47:54
S3: buck bit of laughter and and reminiscing and finding out secrets involved.
00:47:58
S1: Some things happen. Secrets are really Franco Nero's.
00:48:01
S3: And oh yeah, it's
00:48:02
S1: kind of bookended by Judi Dench, Afrika Nero, who have kind of a scene. Now there's a couple of echoes that we've seen. I've seen Spike Lee in the story of champagne, which is the title says,
00:48:16
S3: and that story being so well, it's
00:48:19
S1: a long story. It's the history of champagne. I mean, kind of goes into why we can't call it champagne champagne. It's narrated by Stephen Fry, who also plays a character out of a restoration play called Safwat Bling Flutter, who kind of this is, you know, hams it up.
00:48:32
S3: Isn't that what he does every night is?
00:48:36
S1: But James Bond makes quite an appearance in this documentary because of course, there is an association between Bond and Championship that you and I have both seen Eric Clapton, the lockdown sessions directed by US title man Eric Clapton and his band Nathan Eastgate and Chris Stainton. February of this year they were due to give a concert
00:48:59
S3: at the Albert Hall
00:49:00
S1: and COVID happened. So Eric said, Hey, guys, come back to my house, which is a huge mansion, and they essentially they recorded an acoustic version of what they would have played on the night to stream to the audiences who missed out. And this doc is kind of interspersed with their process, I guess how they kind of work together to make this okay,
00:49:27
S3: Chris, fairly rare. They didn't do it much. I just didn't feel. I mean, it wasn't an insight into Eric Clapton. And I think, as I said to off beforehand, he's a very interesting man. I mean, it's not what it's supposed to be, which is fine, but I don't think it should have pretended that it was a document. I don't know whether this is a documentary. Well, yeah.
00:49:49
S1: Well, actually, it may be. I'm saying it's a documentary and it is actually a concert film, but it is interspersed with these kind of between songs. They talk about how they do the arrangements in
00:49:59
S3: which, Hey, Steve Gadd, one of my all time favorite,
00:50:01
S1: I know I know
00:50:02
S3: there. And look, I actually did say to you, this is a little bit like it's got a very it's sort of sepia. Ties, as you admit, it's going to vary. I sort of said it's like the slow food now things you watch and slow travel,
00:50:17
S1: you slow
00:50:18
S3: hand, it is slow. There you go. So there's a thematic and you do. I mean, the beautiful songs. He play some really beautiful songs and they're all acoustic. So look, I would worry about, you know, how much I would enjoy having paid for it in the cinema?
00:50:33
S1: Yeah, well, I did enjoy it. Now the other one, we've seen a war film. We've talked about this before. How many? The proliferation of warfare
00:50:45
S3: with the British is a very stiff upper lip.
00:50:47
S1: It's it's hard to say this is First World War. The film is called The War Below. It's the first time feature director JP Watts. It is the story of a group of mining engineers or digging engineers who are essentially conscripted by the by the army to come over to Europe and dig tunnels to get under the Germans because they badly losing the war in the trenches.
00:51:20
S3: Now, if that sounds like you've heard that plot before,
00:51:23
S1: there is another film that deals with the same story closer
00:51:26
S3: to home. Yes, beneath hill 60 from 2010 Jeremy Simmons film, which is essentially the same. Well, it's the same story, the same battle. And there are other. There were other miners as well, which is not actually mentioned in this film.
00:51:41
S1: No, it's not. It does sort of present it like Visigoths. But I guess what this film does that I don't remember beneath Hill 60 dealing with. It's very much about the class system in England and how the the military hierarchy really looks down on these guys because they dig sewers. Yeah. And and yet they become attorney. They bring about a turning point.
00:52:12
S3: But it's very safe. I mean, we've seen so it's very good. Yes. Sorry, very honest. I mean, it doesn't go very deep into those ideas you've seen and the tropes they played. It's true.
00:52:23
S1: Now we're going to talk about another film that you and I have seen. But before we do know British Film Festival would be complete without Timothy Spall.
00:52:33
S3: Oh yes.
00:52:34
S1: He's in three films in this festival. I've seen two of them, so he's in. He's in a film called The Last Bus, which he kind of ages up a little bit to play quite a adultery. Oh, that's a big look
00:52:48
S3: old enough already. Well, I thought so.
00:52:51
S1: But then the second film I saw, I've got quite a surprise because he always looked, Oh, he's of, this is a really lovely idea. He's a he's wife of many years dies. They live in John O'Groats, which is as far north in England as you can get. But their romance happened at Land's End in Cornwall, which is as far south as you can get. And he's got his big pension, a bus pass, and he decides to take her ashes and sprinkle them at Land's End, where their romance happened, travelling only on local buses from one end of the country to the other. The last
00:53:28
S3: time I looked know England is not that big,
00:53:30
S1: but
00:53:31
S3: you know these are these are people say it's not like from Townsville. So this is a sort
00:53:38
S1: of, I guess it's a vignette sort of film because what happens? It's a road movie. It is a road movie, and he meets people along the way. And kind of, well, I guess we get an insight into how he views the world and there's a parallel story it represents. It said it
00:53:54
S3: well.
00:53:56
S1: It's set in recent years, but it also tells the story of there as there of a second here. And the other film he's in is really, if you're a Peter Greenaway fan, this would be a film for you. If you're not, I'm not quite sure.
00:54:12
S3: I believe it's huge still out there
00:54:13
S1: to buy an Australian director called Daniel Graham. The film is called The Obscure Life of the Grand Duke of Corsica. Timothy Spall This time is a much younger kind of eccentric and curmudgeonly, but but cutting edge architect who was engaged by a billionaire who calls himself the Duke of Corsica, played by Peter has still, Marais is great in it, and he wants the architect to build him a mausoleum because he's dying.
00:54:47
S3: That sounds like a Peter Greenaway plot, if I ever it.
00:54:50
S1: So visually and narratively, it's very. Peter Greenaway says he's passed away as yeah, and there's a parallel story about a 13th century kind of St Francis of Assisi that kind of reflects on what is happening in the present day story and.
00:55:10
S3: A riff off a Glen, your lifestyle.
00:55:12
S1: Yes, yeah, yeah.
00:55:14
S3: Not a satire. Yes. Okay. Yeah. So we miss him now. We need to next his. Yeah. OK, fair enough. All right.
00:55:22
S1: I'll miss him. Now you and I both say boiling point. Oh yes. Set in a restaurant in Christmas week. High tension, high pressure. Great actor Stephen Graham and actor I really like who played Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire. It was in The Irishman, and he's a really good actor. He plays Andy, who's a sort of Britain hawk on the edge kind of head chef partner in this restaurant. It's sort of a bit on the edge as a restaurant and his nemesis, a television celebrity chef, is coming in tonight. And so the tensions that already exist amongst the staff with what the health department is putting on them and all those kind of things come to a head. And that tension is sort of embody because the whole thing's shot in a single shot
00:56:19
S3: and and a proper single shot as far as I can see it, like, Oh my God. 17 which might go for eight minutes.
00:56:26
S1: Yeah, no.
00:56:27
S3: This thing is fascinating to say. It looks like it's shot in real,
00:56:30
S1: so it in real time. It is a really interesting hybrid between film and theater. Yeah, because the performances are happening concurrently with the shooting of the film. Yeah. Not tomorrow will come back and shoot that scene. Yeah. And I found that just raised the tension in a really effective way.
00:56:51
S3: And I didn't know I felt like, I think there's a better film there if it was shot, giving the actors the opportunity to do better performances at times. That's how I felt.
00:57:06
S1: Yeah, and I didn't. You know, it may be. I love Stephen Graham and the single shot worked for me.
00:57:11
S3: Well, I'll give you an example of this, though, because of the conceit on it you never really get. You don't get close ups in this film. And Stephen Graham is a wonderfully in Inwood actor. He he doesn't do a lot. It's all in here, and I think you require close ups to see that you're coming.
00:57:30
S1: You're right, you don't get close up, but you do get you keep moving on. You know, I think there's some scenes between he and I just sort of played by Planet Robbins.
00:57:38
S3: I don't understand that. I don't understand what you think of bringing something to the film. I think it didn't bring much at all to the film, and I would rather see the film. I also think it's underwritten as well. So, you know, I was quite disappointed because I like Stephen Graham to it.
00:57:53
S1: Well, maybe people should go and see it for themselves,
00:57:56
S3: maybe make up their own
00:57:57
S1: mind because it is part of the British film and it's more we get to see. It's on at the moment that Kim Patel and I were talking about a very short time ago. We just tried to give him a little bit of a snapshot of eight of the films we've seen. But this much more, including a statement, was saying a really good seven from the 70s set of retrospective films. But we are out of time. Crazy is seems to often happen to us. Let me just say thanks to our guests tonight. Jeff Cobham from Brookmeyer Meyer phone Kim, Fatalis, you of course Mark Gracey. And thanks to Margaret F for producing, talk to you next week by.
S1: Welcome to behind the scenes, my name's Chris Thompson, and each week as we talk about the arts and culture across Melbourne, across Victoria and across the country, we acknowledge the Boomerang and Warren Gerry Peoples of the Island Nation, the traditional custodians of the land on which we make this show. We pay our respects to their ancestors and elders past, present and emerging. And remember that they are part of the longest continuing culture in the world. We're back to South Australia for the start of this week's show in Adelaide correspondent Geoff Cobham. He's going to catch us up on what's been happening locally before introducing us to prolific and multi award winning playwright Finnegan Brookmeyer. Then there's something a little bit different coming from Arena Theatre in Bendigo. It's a community picnic under the stars and a screening of By, a film directed by Eliza Hall, featuring four South Sudanese performers who live in Bendigo, one of whom is Kuhnen Thorne, who's here to tell us about the event. Meanwhile, we're back in the cinemas and just in time for the British Film Festival. We'll catch up with festival director Kim Fatalis before Mark Gracey drops by to chat about a few of the films in the festival's extensive programme. They're all on tonight's edition. A behind the scenes with me Chris Thompson right here on Vision Australia radio. Well, it's the second show of the month, which means we must be in Adelaide with artistic director of theatre Jeff Goldblum, welcome back to the show.
00:02:16
S2: Hurray! I'm here in Adelaide in the middle of the Asia Festival. Oh, she's an absolute delight.
00:02:26
S1: So are you? Are you working on it or are you just a happy punter?
00:02:31
S2: Just an everyday punter. I am. I went to a fabulous show called Double Delicious, which certainly was doubly delicious because in between the five acts we got for a five course meal, so fantastic. Basically, imagine the best Asian cooks telling you stories about their lives whilst they cook, and then you get the food they have talked about. Wow. In between the performances.
00:03:03
S1: Wow.
00:03:04
S2: It was a fantastic experience, and the finale was Elizabeth Chong and 90 year old chef who has been like the mother of Chinese cooking in Australia and who told us that her father invented the dim scheme as we know it in Australia, which I really chuffed about. Yeah. Well, I hope she means the the way she's
00:03:33
S1: talking to Melbourne, Dave Sims and are not the ones I used to sit beside the Chicco rolls in the bay.
00:03:39
S2: I was not sure. I hope will.
00:03:45
S1: I seem to recall that she's actually been on the show talking about that very event that happened here at the Abbotsford Convert a year or so ago. So, you know, you don't get everything first.
00:03:57
S2: No, certainly not all Guns N Roses.
00:04:03
S1: Oh well, have you got any tickets for Guns N
00:04:04
S2: Roses is coming here next Tuesday. You know, that makes me think that the pandemic is over
00:04:14
S1: or that we've just completely given up. Yeah.
00:04:19
S2: Oh, yeah, that was an absolute delight to go to that show, and then the very next night, I went to a a feast for the For The Eyes and Ears, which was a show called Rahu. I'm probably not pronouncing that correctly, which you may have seen as well. I'm not sure it's a fantastic shadow puppet show.
00:04:41
S1: No, I haven't.
00:04:42
S2: An Indonesian up Asian artist called Chu Mahdi, and he tells the most profound and beautiful story through shadow cut out. The stage is set with two overhead projectors like the old fashioned ones. We had a soup and that that's all. And then there's four musicians who are playing a variety of the customers, and there's no electronic music they can see. And that basically they it's nonverbal and they tell the story of everything that had everything from the scene that has interacted with the island of Indonesia. Oh, wow. So first of all, is fruit that gets washed up and turned into into these other plants and food that colonized the land. And then it's all the different sorts of traders who come to the land and it just goes on and on. It's a massive scale of how it goes through the history of the island, as seen from the islands point of view of what the sea has bought them.
00:05:51
S1: And what venues are playing
00:05:53
S2: that that was in the state theatre?
00:05:55
S1: Oh, lovely.
00:05:56
S2: Yeah, it was great. It was quite intimate and the music was just delightful, so playful and powerful. And just to have those musicians right there with you. It was a most extraordinary performance. I really, really, you know, it's one I'll never forget that experience of being these incredibly detailed cut out and the people operating them because you got to see the operation of it all. And they were sort of animate things and they would slide them from one projected to the other. There was at times three people operating them and they had 300 different slides each to put on, which were just bits of cardboard that had been cut out by the artists themselves.
00:06:37
S1: So you see when you see a show like that because you're someone that works, you know, right on the edge of a lot of technology, certainly in sound and lighting. Yeah. And we've talked about that before. When we talked about your show, The Lighthouse, it was such a beautiful kind of use of really cutting edge technology. But when you see a show like that, is that a really grounding thing for someone like you that wants to do? I guess that beautiful, delicate handmade work, but use the tools that we've got available to us to your experience.
00:07:18
S2: Absolutely profoundly there reminder that the analog is still the power behind all the digital as well. You know, like my work, basically, I'm doing I'm basically bringing my my analog skills from the 70s and 80s into the new technology. It's why I'm able to use the new technology well, because I have an understanding and a love of the analog. Yeah, and seeing that play out in front of you, like that's the things that people love, like the things that people love in life are. We give them a string with a light on the end and they sit around and it's makes a line of life like that's something that is primitive in all of that. And I think Shadow Shadow Play is also a very primitive thing and was probably one of the very first forms of theater. You know, you would have made shadows in the cave from the firelight, I imagine, you know, they're there things that are even built into us, and we respond to them in a very primitive way. And yeah, it is really reaffirming to be reminded about the simplicity of design and the the the old kind of keep it simple, stupid, which also which also
00:08:34
S1: happens to
00:08:38
S2: be coming to Adelaide on November the 24th in the entertainment centre. I mean, you have
00:08:43
S1: all the good shows, he said. Guns N Roses, who says Adelaide is stuck in the 80s? Sorry, I lied. That was unkind of me to say.
00:08:56
S2: But prove it.
00:08:59
S1: Yeah, just called. Oh God, no, you've got another one.
00:09:02
S2: Oh, the other big thing we're excited about is we have the festival of orchestras. Oh, thank you. Raise funding the the AFO have put together six nights in the Adelaide Showground. Where every night is a different, magical spectacular, from a classical spectacular to Camino Borana tonight on Broadway. And the angels are playing, and it was the Ministry of Sound. Oh, well, most, most massive undertaking. You know, it's really ambitious and that's that's an exciting thing which would never be able to have ever done without the, you know, thank you cut of it, I suppose. We had funding bubble that has enabled the ASO to make such a public outpouring of music for everyone.
00:09:57
S1: It's like. It sounds like a fabulous event, but for a very small moment when you first mentioned it, I had this image of like a dozen orchestras, all in the Showgrounds, all at the same time.
00:10:10
S2: Like Battle of the Bands,
00:10:11
S1: Battle of the Bands. I. Jeff Cobb. And this is our last Adelaide check for 2021. But I think we're going to pick it up again in the new year.
00:10:27
S2: I would love to. That would be great fun and it'll be a whole new brand new world by then.
00:10:32
S1: Oh, it will. So we will catch up again in the new year. But in the meantime,
00:10:39
S2: I have a special,
00:10:40
S1: as I say to you, Thank you so much for your Adelaide stories in the last few months. Who is the artist that you're going to introduce us to this month? Yes.
00:10:50
S2: Well, this is a delightful man who I have done since he was a young man when he used to be a sort of wandering poet around the city and he would emcee events. And he was a little powerhouse around Town, who has now become a powerhouse writer around the entire world. The most the prolific writer of stories for children. And I think when you talk to him, you'll find the ridiculous number of plays he often has in production at any one time around the world, and he's a fantastic success story. He Nathalie Boy, who spent a lot of time recently and has even in fact living in Adelaide, and he has written plays for all of us and we've all, you know, done been lucky to work with him on many different shows, and I'm sure he'll have lots of great news for you.
00:11:44
S1: Fantastic. And his name is
00:11:48
S2: Finnegan Crook of mine.
00:11:50
S1: Well, Jeff Cogburn, always lovely to talk to you. We'll catch up again in the new year. And welcome to the show, Finnegan Crocodile.
00:11:59
S2: Thank you very much. Lovely to chat.
00:12:02
S1: Now, if I was to read out a list of every play you've written and then a list of every award that those plays have won and then a list of every country in the world where those plays have been performed. I think we would have to extend the show into next week. You are the most amazingly prolific writer. How is that? What is it about you that just means that you just keep writing and it's not. It's not hack work. They're really good place.
00:12:38
S2: Oh, thank you. The nice thing about chatting in this way is you can't. So I'm a bit of a blocker.
00:12:44
S1: So, oh, we can hear that blush like we could hear those red cheeks.
00:12:52
S2: I think I've honestly been very lucky. I think it's been this lovely, serious the Stepping Stones, whereby one show that's been written has happened to have a nice touring life and then the places it's reach to have mean that it's been encountered by various producers or directors or or actors who then become friends. And we have our own facts about work and kind of one thing leads to another. And and yeah, over a period of time, over enough years, it's become this. This is just this lovely point of critical mass whereby enough plays are going on around the world and then being seen that that it means that yes, they can. They can be having lived lives far and wide, and I and I sit back and hear about the fun journeys they're going on, which feels really lovely.
00:13:37
S1: When did you know that you could write?
00:13:41
S2: I knew that I loved writing and that I wanted to write from a very, very young age. But it was, yeah, being a avid, hungry reader from a very young age and then wondering about what words people could pour into the world and and going through these formative exercises of trying that and then kind of through very simple call and response. That's like doing stand up comedy or doing performance poetry, hearing the effect the words could have in the immediate so. So if I uttered this line, this is the life that comes in response or if this one is is sadder and more contemplative, maybe I can see the reactions on people's faces going, okay, this is the potency of words when they land in the right order. You can. You can. Yeah, you can be conveying emotion and making one person feel a sentiment, but your feeling and and so it was really an exercise of just building upon that, and I'm still 100 per cent learning. It's still an ongoing quest that will never, ever, ever end. And I still write a whole lot of deadline, which kind of fell flat. But but within those are, yeah, those lovely occasional narratives or monologues or characters created who for some reason seem to resonate with an audience. And that's always that's always just a pleasure. It's just lovely.
00:15:04
S1: That way you've described it. Plus, of course, Jeff Cockburn's description of you as this young wandering poet around. It sounds like you write from inside the story rather than outside the story.
00:15:20
S2: Yes, true. I think that's very true. I think, yeah, that's a lovely observation. I I'm not frightened. I've never trained as a writer. I don't know much about the craft of writing, I would argue, other than, yes, being this, this this reader who just loves reading. And so you kind of cosmetically take on nice narratives in that way. But it's all really about the exercise of honesty, of kind of inventing a character or encountering a character and then trying to write them as truthfully and faithfully as possible and testing each line for rigor along the way kind of hearing as the text is falling onto the page or the computer. Whether this seems like a sentiment they would embrace, whether they would articulate the world in that way and an editing in real time. And and you just keep working until it feels tangible, until they feel like a three dimensional version of the character. And then you find some other characters to kind of smash them up against or worlds or scenarios to exist in. But you're right, it's very much a sense of being embedded in the thing that I need to say or the tasks they need to undertake. And then just trying to go along for the ride. And it really does often feel as indulgent as that. But you know, I'm just riding the coattails of these characters who are who are way more interesting than me, and it's lovely.
00:16:45
S1: You described yourself, I think, as a hungry reader. And you've also mentioned that you did some stand up and you know, we know you were wondering poet. And so at some point you must have decided not novelist, not stand up, not poet. Playwright. Yeah. What was the point at which you went playwright? That's pretty much that's what's going on. My tax return
00:17:12
S2: is. Yes, it's a it's a funny question to be think about now because I'm kind of I'm deciding that in this moment, too, like after after years of really focusing very heavily on the player. I think I'm writing a screenplay and I am writing a novel at the moment, and I am rediscovering the pleasure of writing poetry. So so I'm I'm kind of discovering breath again, but definitely for those interim years and continuing on in these current years, I I enjoy the immediacy of theatre and I enjoy the the amalgam of a collective exercise and a personal exercise that sense of sitting in your own seat in the theater and being in total to have a very kind of emotionally indulgent, contemplative, cathartic experience sitting by yourself in a theater and hearing a narrative and then also being part of the collective one, being part of an audience that laughs together or, you know, set that year together or whatever it is that I think there are there are only so many moments when when those two things can kind of come together in a really nice symbiosis. And I and I think theatre, for whatever magic reason is one of those things you you're allowed to be part of the collective and you're allowed to to be, um. Yeah, going on your very own intimate journey. And it's I think it's a wonderful, wonderful medium.
00:18:39
S1: I've had discussions before with, you know, really great writers of young adult fiction, really great writers of theatre for young people, all those kind of categories. Yeah. And it's really common that in those discussions, what you discover is that that's how the work gets program, but it's not how it's written. It's not as this is a work for teenagers. It's written as this is a piece of theatre. Do you fall into that category?
00:19:12
S2: Hundred percent, yeah, and you're right, I think that most of the discussions I have with my colleagues and peers and mentors and pride sees us all kind of singing from the same hymn book and and yeah, I think artistically one has to do that just because you like in in selecting a part of the population that the work it's or you're on in an unspoken way, kind of naming a part of the population that it's not for. And I think that's a problematic exercise. I think the making of art should be as all encompassing as possible. And so, so yes, maybe it falls under the the T.Y. umbrella from a production perspective. But but in terms of who it is for and who it who was allowed to access it? I think that should be as broad as possible. And and also just that lovely sense of economy, the writers I love the most and the books I love the most. You know, they say so much more with less. And to me, that is the real potency of children's theatre is that, you know, it conveys big emotions and big landscapes of big, complex issues with comparatively simple language. And in 50 minutes, as opposed to in three hours and often with only a couple of actors, you know, because of the economic impositions as opposed to a full cast. And I think that those are all actually really healthy things, but that sense of how to how to construct a world or convey a big narrative with with tighter sentences and and more accessible metaphors. And and, you know, a landscape that can be accessed by somebody with a smaller vocabulary and a larger one. But emotionally, the the work is no less demanding.
00:20:59
S1: I've seen a number of your plays, I haven't seen all. Whatever it is, 100 or more that you've written. But then I have seen enough and it's often it often strikes me that you sit in the theater and you feel like you're looking at the world sort of sideways through a slightly distorted lens. Things like logic and naturalism. I'm going to say the enemy of a writer like you do, you need to be free to interpret the world in whatever way makes sense to you and then to the audience.
00:21:39
S2: Yeah, I think it's I think it's more of the latter notion. I I don't feel threatened or challenged by any style or genre or form. And then I think naturalism, you know, you can you can wholly embed an audience in a very realistic moment of of two people encountering each other in the life. And it feels like it's taken out of the real world and that 100 percent fine. And that really works for some scenes. But but when it feels like an imposition, when it feels like this character can only feel can only convey the next stage of their revolution by growing wings of fly, then I feel I should let them grow and fly. Or, you know, when when they need to split into multiple people because there are different sides to this complex personality and one human won't won't quite provide all of those all of those angles in a 50 minute introduction to the audience. Then I will make them three triplet sisters who are left in the woods, you know, like so. So yes, I have written naturalism and entire plays a bit before, but I yeah, I don't from my own selfish reasons, for the artistic reasons and for the audiences reasons. I don't ever want to feel inhibited by sticking to one form where another or a bastardization of a might might tell the story better. Is that okay? Does that make sense?
00:23:07
S1: Yes, that's okay, food, you can do that
00:23:10
S2: right
00:23:13
S1: now in Melbourne. We're about to see a play of yours, which is an adaptation of Alison Lester's Magic Beach, which has just been nominated for What You 112th Augie Award. Congratulations. What's the difference for you to approach a project that's coming entirely from your imagination of in Cucamonga? I play this is this has to actually make sense in terms of people who love that book.
00:23:46
S2: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I think it's that I think it's the acknowledgement that the audience you're about to encounter already has a relationship with the material. And it's not about precept. It's not about kind of taking them off on your own flights of fancy. It's about trying to in some small way, three dimensional way emulate the experience they have when sitting down to that same narrative. So. So it's it's definitely a more kind of considered editing exercise than I've done before. Often I just let myself write and let the characters take whatever form they make. This was more scrutiny all the way through of going, Okay, how is this deviating from what I believe to be Alison Nestor's intent? How would these kids on a beach following in the footsteps, the sandy footsteps of of the one that we find in the book? And for me, really what it was about with this, I had a big thing and I decide it's about just finding the the dramatic hook because there are many beautiful things in that book, but there isn't really conflict. So much it is. It's such a lovely embracing world like a beach holiday that you could sit in. And um. And I realized that, yeah, I needed to find what the what the little battle or turmoil in it might be. So I've got this. This must be older sibling who's deciding whether she can still have the imagination of her younger ones, which is what occurs in the book or whether she has to grow up now and the days of imagining are over. And and so it's kind of within the happiness of the other moments in the play. It's also watching her struggle with that and allowing the audience at whatever age they might be right up to adult to do the same.
00:25:37
S1: Do you ever say no to a project?
00:25:41
S2: Yes, I do, I do, um, I I. Yeah. Oh, I don't know how to say this, really. I I if I feel like the the kind of the commercial imperatives of a project may be more at the forefront of America's mind than the artistic one, then I'll probably politely step away from that or suggest somebody else. Um, if I feel like there's there's a. I don't know an imbalance to me doing the work, if it's a voice that has to be articulated by somebody else, maybe somebody who in real life is closer to that character or to that circumstance or to that issue than I think it is, it's right to step back and allow that role to be filled by someone else. And sometimes, if it's just the pragmatics of time, and if I feel that I can't do a good job because my play is a bit too full at the moment, then I then I will say probably for those three reasons.
00:26:40
S1: Yeah, thing we could keep talking for ages, I suspect. Oh yeah, I bet you. And it would be quite fascinating to do. So maybe we'll get you back on the show another time to continue this conversation. All right. But it's been great to talk to you, and here you kind of talk about the process and the way you exist within the writing that you create. The plays I've seen have been fantastic took us for the Augie's for the stage. Thank you very much. And thank you so much for being on the show.
00:27:20
S2: Not a complete pleasure. Thank you to you. And thanks to Jeff for the intro and and yeah, no, no. It's a.
00:27:31
S1: Well, Arena Theatre Company based in Bendigo, has been on the show a couple of times before talking about their work, which predominantly happens with young people and often in schools, but also at festivals and in theatre spaces. But this coming weekend, this coming Friday and Saturday, they have a slightly different project that they have been working on with Bendigo venues and events. The event is called by and one of the performers in the event is Kunene Thorne, who is on the line. Welcome to the show, Kunene.
00:28:06
S2: Thank you.
00:28:08
S1: Now, this is an unusual event because it's a performance, but it's a filmed performance of a South Sudanese group that you belong to that has settled in Bendigo, is that right?
00:28:21
S2: Yeah, that's true.
00:28:23
S1: So tell me about Tell Me About Bae and what the word means.
00:28:29
S2: So by the meaning behind it to whom? Do you call your home by in our language Dinka? So it's been a program that we started working on it. Two years of a foot, over two years now. Wow. And yeah, it's been going great. We started it thinking just a little group of static starting to sing and teach ourselves how to sing or do anything. And it came up later on that we can perform at events or anywhere. And then we did two performance in Bendigo here. And the biggest one was in Castlemaine, which was in much of the Castlemaine Festival. And after that, we were meant to do another one this year, in November. In October, sorry. But then because of COVID due to COVID, we decided to do a video like a film. So we did a film for that one, which is a new experience for us. None of us in the in the film have never done any type of film before in our life, so that was our first one. And it's been amazing so far since we went for it. They've been great.
00:29:53
S1: And this isn't just putting a video camera in front of the performance and recording that and then showing it, it's actually got a really terrific film creative team behind it, Eliza, Hull and Jack. Why the directors and award winning cinematographer Kieran Watson beneath behind the camera. How long did they work with you on how to make a live performance look the way it should look when it's on film?
00:30:30
S2: So I can say it was just for two days. But planning it was like four weeks ago. So we planned it for like weeks and decide like what we can do, and we plan our locations position where we can build this, this type of um. Events or this type of thing that we can do in the life. But then it took us weeks and ideas as well. EV1 ideas was in there was included. And then when we decided to do their their film, it was just for two days, right? They found it.
00:31:13
S1: And the the group that's performing is you and three others. Yes. So tell me about the other three.
00:31:22
S2: OK, so it's me. Martha could do an ideal on it and then young might.
00:31:31
S1: And you're quite young. All of you as young as 14 and up to 22. Yes. How long have you all been working together?
00:31:45
S2: Since 2019. Wow. Yes.
00:31:51
S1: And is it the just the four of you that work together or is there a larger group in the community that you interact with?
00:31:57
S2: No. Used to be a larger community, so used to be fostered in Esquire for women. And then later on, he drove down to the Golf one.
00:32:12
S1: And when did you come to Bendigo?
00:32:15
S2: I came to Bendigo in 2018 much.
00:32:20
S1: And is there a strong South Sudanese community in Bendigo?
00:32:26
S2: Not very strong hands in Melbourne. Yeah.
00:32:29
S1: Mm hmm. And so describe the performance for me are these dancers that are telling stories in the way you perform.
00:32:41
S2: Yes. There is yet each one of us in the film are telling our story.
00:32:50
S1: And you tell the story through dance and song.
00:32:55
S2: Through dense and bone is good authority. But through telling it is the one that is our story. So we say the stories in the anchor. Well, everyone.
00:33:11
S1: And when you've performed at things like Kesselman Festival, are these generally outdoor performances or do you perform in theatres?
00:33:20
S2: It was outdoor outdoor.
00:33:24
S1: And so this coming Friday and Saturday, it's a picnic event, even though it's I presume you've got a big screen outdoors and people will sit like they do it outdoor cinemas all over the place. Yes. Are your performances usually in this lovely kind of under the stars sort of format? Or are they often during the day?
00:33:48
S2: The often during the day.
00:33:50
S1: Yeah. So that would make. So that make this weekend quite special.
00:33:56
S2: Yes, that's true, that's true. Cause will be at like eight p.m.. Yeah, that yeah.
00:34:03
S1: And people will bring a picnic and some rugs and chairs and sit around and talk to each other. And then at some point, everyone's focus will turn to the screen and we'll see your performance of bye. But then there's more to it, isn't there? After the performance, I think you're going to sing live, aren't you?
00:34:22
S2: Yes, we are. Yeah. After the performance, it would be displayed on the wall and after that would sing live and we would dance as well.
00:34:33
S1: Oh, fantastic.
00:34:34
S2: Yeah. And we will do some speeches like after the knees acknowledgement. We'll do that as well.
00:34:43
S1: Fantastic. Tell me about the space. This is the space is connected to the The Burrow Theatre, which is the beautiful theatre space in Bendigo, but it's a garden setting outside the theatre.
00:35:02
S2: Yeah, it's um, it's a little garden that is behind the theatre. At Bendigo Senior. So it's behind it's behind a lumber theater somewhere there.
00:35:18
S1: Lovely. So the event is this Friday and Saturday. Yes. It'll probably still be a bit chilly at night, won't it? So people can rack up, but it's bring a picnic, bring a blanket. It's a free event. People are not paying for the tickets, but you still have to register. You still have to say I'm coming. And book a free ticket, which people can do, either through the Arena Theatre Company website or through the Alhambra Boro website. Sounds like a beautiful event, konan. Yeah. It must also be exciting. You've been in lockdown quite a lot this year. Two, Haven't you?
00:36:04
S2: Yeah.
00:36:06
S1: Well, this will this be the first time that you've performed live since the lockdowns ended?
00:36:13
S2: Yes, that's the first time you
00:36:16
S1: have very exciting.
00:36:18
S2: Very.
00:36:19
S1: So we get to see the performance that you would have done in October up on the screen. And then we get to see a performance that the four of you will do live. Yes, it's it's a very exciting event. I'm really pleased that Arena Theatre Company have been able to get involved in this. I hope it goes very well. Let's keep our fingers crossed for good weather on Friday and Saturday. Otherwise, you you'll have to run inside the theatre if it rains.
00:36:50
S2: I agree. I agree. And just to add, yeah, the location for the performance. Yup. Is there area at a lumber theatre? It is always. No, not. The I think it's called culture sculpture garden,
00:37:09
S1: oh, the Culture Garden, which is behind the Alhambra Theatre,
00:37:13
S2: yeah. Is the grass between the two heritage bellowing.
00:37:20
S1: Fantastic. And of course, that's in Bendigo. Yeah. Couldn't you tell? It's been lovely to talk to you. I hope this coming weekend is glorious weather, but nice and dark so people can see the film well. Yes, good. Good luck for it.
00:37:36
S2: All right, thank you very much. It was good to talk to you.
00:37:44
S1: Well, Kim Fatalis is the national program manager for Palace Cinemas. Clearly, it's a job that doesn't take up enough of his time because he's also director of the British Film Festival, which is back on real screens in real cinemas with audiences sitting in seats. Welcome to the show, Kim.
00:38:04
S2: Thank you, Chris.
00:38:06
S1: You must be pretty excited to actually have bodies in the space.
00:38:11
S2: Yeah, it's been a long journey. The last 18 months and you know, we're incredibly excited that we opened our cinemas down in Victoria just over a week ago, and at one stage we weren't sure whether the British festival will be able to go ahead. So we'd actually be delighted by week and fingers crossed that everything would work. And thankfully it did. And we've got a great festival on our screens. You have. Yes, I think it's our strongest festival yet, and it's it's, you know, packed with absolute, you know, quality British cinema
00:38:49
S1: when you've got the spectre of lockdowns and pandemic sitting on your shoulder. How much harder is it to program for something that? There's probably a little voice going. It might not happen.
00:39:05
S2: Look, we saw that with the unfortunately with the Melbourne Film Festival, but they pulled an incredible amount of work into their festival and, you know, had to be an online festival. And you know, there was that fear that we would be able to, you know, be on screen. But we were very, very hopeful, constantly looking at our numbers, looking at forecasts and with the latest bye week, which, you know, was a kind of a safety net. And thankfully, it all worked out. We got there in the end. But it did give me plenty of time to see, you know, a lot of movies at home over the lockdown.
00:39:41
S1: Now we're going to talk about some of the films in the programme in just a moment. But can you just tell me a little bit about the seven from the 70s because I really love that line up?
00:39:54
S2: Yeah, it look. They say it's one of my favourite periods from, you know, British cinema. It was in 1971, in particular, was a ground breaking year for British films. In a sense, that ship had really stifled the film industry for decades and that it was finally losing its loosening its grip in that period, and that it ushered in that newfound freedom in cinema. And some of those films that we've selected in the festival are still controversial, even by today's standards. I mean, A Clockwork Orange and Straw Dogs, you know, just, you know, wonderful films.
00:40:30
S1: Do you feel that festivals like these have a sort of responsibility to new generations to put them in touch with these sort of iconic films? I suspect that you like me saw a lot of these films in their first release, and they had quite an impact on me. I know some of these films films like Straw Dogs and Clockwork Orange. Is that a role of a festival like this to go? Don't just see what's happening now, but touch base with things that are the foundations.
00:41:07
S2: I look, I think we have to really look at our history to be able to move forward without, you know, our film sensibility. And I think it's really important for festivals to showcase these absolute classics on the big screen the way that the in the filmmakers had originally intended. And you know, these films, as I said, you know, by today's standards, they're still, you know, brilliant pieces of filmmaking. And every year I get incredibly excited about putting together the retrospective part of me as the British Film Festival. And, you know, thankfully, I was able to secure Clockwork Orange this year, which is a new 4K restoration. And the film looks absolutely stunning and just the lighting in the film and the the costumes and everything so experienced that on the big screen, you don't get that at home.
00:42:02
S1: Hmm. The festivals around the country kicked off on the 3rd of November in Sydney. Melbourne, of course, kicked off on Friday night with the Duke, which we'll talk about in a moment. And runs until the 1st of December. Canberra Canberra's underway. Brisbane is underway, Adelaide is underway, Perth is underway. Byron Bay is underway. Just good old Melbourne that's been behind everything for the last years. It's is is the last one to get going. What's this? Is the film. This is the question that you can never answer. But what's the film in the program that you're most excited that you're able to present?
00:42:50
S2: Oh, look, I can't go past Belfast in my role at Palace. I'm just so fortunate to see so many wonderful films. However, when I see an absolute gem of a film, it really reignites my passion. And this is this film is it's quite spectacular. It's a very, very moving film. It moves me enormously. It's a it's Kenneth brand. It's almost a love letter to his hometown of Belfast. It's shot in beautiful, stunning black and white. And there's a lot of buzz about this film that will feature very heavily in the Academy Awards next year. And I I thoroughly agree it's it's just a masterful piece of work and incredible performances, and in the direction of Kenneth Branagh is just incredible, and it's basically it's almost historic, the semi-autobiographical story, but it's just a beautiful piece of filmmaking.
00:43:49
S1: Well, I have to say I'm looking forward to that, but I'm also looking forward to the new Edgar Wright film, which which I think it's been a little. Coming for those of us that have been in lockdown, but I know you're you're backed up with a whole lot of things to do so. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us, Kim. And I think a congratulations in order. Are you leaving Palace at the end of this year?
00:44:15
S2: I'm actually retiring from my role at the end of the year. I just thought it was time to spend a little bit more time with my family. However, I will be certainly working in the background with Palace, assisting the new programming director and just helping the company moving forward with my experience and lots of the industry.
00:44:37
S1: Fantastic. Well, congratulations on your 30 years at Palace. Congratulations on this year's British Film Festival and Mark Gracey and I are now going to talk about a few of the films we've already seen. Kim Fatalis, thanks for being on the show.
00:44:51
S2: Thank you.
00:45:11
S1: Well, my Gracey, you have seen some of the British film festival program that I've seen
00:45:17
S3: that I have, that I have sung
00:45:19
S1: that I've just been talking to him about them. And as I mentioned to him, I have seen the Duke there opening night film, which you haven't. But it's Roger Michel film who sadly died earlier this year, Notting Hill and Tea with the Dames. He also directed that great documentary with. Oh yes, I should be dead to Maggie Smith and two or three years ago, the Duke probably is a bit more time with the dames than not you. It's it's set in the 60s. It's about a taxi driver called Kempton Bunton, played by Jim Broadbent, who is a social reformer. He's got this bee in his bonnet that pensioners shouldn't have to pay television licences, and coincidentally, the government is doing that old one. Coincidentally, the government has just spent $140000 buying a Goya painting of the Duke of Wellington. And so the painting gets stolen from the National Gallery really happened only time anything's ever been stolen, both from the National Gallery, and he tries to ransom it off to raise the money to pay for television licences for all the old age pensions. And meanwhile, his marriage is under a little bit of stress to his. He's his wife, played by Helen Mirren. And so it's a kind of.
00:46:47
S3: And as Harry Potter appear. No, I mean, Jim Broadbent
00:46:52
S1: got off to kind of Harry Potter. So it's it's kind of a sweet and gentle kind of it actually feels feels like a film made in the period of time when the film is set in the 60s. So it's with anything with Jim Broadbent, Helen Mirren is worth seeing. It is, as I say, it's a throwback. It is a bit of a throwback film. There's a couple of films which are the last appearances wrote to Michelle. As I said, this was his last film, the last performance by Kelly Preston, who died on Travoltas. That's right. Sadly, she's in off the rails, which is about four three old friends and a friend of theirs dies. But people like the Big Chill of the South, I will get the phone call and the the dead friend has left them.
00:47:42
S3: Our look. Judi Dench is in it. Yeah, yeah. Where does she get the time?
00:47:46
S1: Blink and you'll miss it. And they head off on a train across Europe to visit a festival that they all promised they'd go to
00:47:54
S3: buck bit of laughter and and reminiscing and finding out secrets involved.
00:47:58
S1: Some things happen. Secrets are really Franco Nero's.
00:48:01
S3: And oh yeah, it's
00:48:02
S1: kind of bookended by Judi Dench, Afrika Nero, who have kind of a scene. Now there's a couple of echoes that we've seen. I've seen Spike Lee in the story of champagne, which is the title says,
00:48:16
S3: and that story being so well, it's
00:48:19
S1: a long story. It's the history of champagne. I mean, kind of goes into why we can't call it champagne champagne. It's narrated by Stephen Fry, who also plays a character out of a restoration play called Safwat Bling Flutter, who kind of this is, you know, hams it up.
00:48:32
S3: Isn't that what he does every night is?
00:48:36
S1: But James Bond makes quite an appearance in this documentary because of course, there is an association between Bond and Championship that you and I have both seen Eric Clapton, the lockdown sessions directed by US title man Eric Clapton and his band Nathan Eastgate and Chris Stainton. February of this year they were due to give a concert
00:48:59
S3: at the Albert Hall
00:49:00
S1: and COVID happened. So Eric said, Hey, guys, come back to my house, which is a huge mansion, and they essentially they recorded an acoustic version of what they would have played on the night to stream to the audiences who missed out. And this doc is kind of interspersed with their process, I guess how they kind of work together to make this okay,
00:49:27
S3: Chris, fairly rare. They didn't do it much. I just didn't feel. I mean, it wasn't an insight into Eric Clapton. And I think, as I said to off beforehand, he's a very interesting man. I mean, it's not what it's supposed to be, which is fine, but I don't think it should have pretended that it was a document. I don't know whether this is a documentary. Well, yeah.
00:49:49
S1: Well, actually, it may be. I'm saying it's a documentary and it is actually a concert film, but it is interspersed with these kind of between songs. They talk about how they do the arrangements in
00:49:59
S3: which, Hey, Steve Gadd, one of my all time favorite,
00:50:01
S1: I know I know
00:50:02
S3: there. And look, I actually did say to you, this is a little bit like it's got a very it's sort of sepia. Ties, as you admit, it's going to vary. I sort of said it's like the slow food now things you watch and slow travel,
00:50:17
S1: you slow
00:50:18
S3: hand, it is slow. There you go. So there's a thematic and you do. I mean, the beautiful songs. He play some really beautiful songs and they're all acoustic. So look, I would worry about, you know, how much I would enjoy having paid for it in the cinema?
00:50:33
S1: Yeah, well, I did enjoy it. Now the other one, we've seen a war film. We've talked about this before. How many? The proliferation of warfare
00:50:45
S3: with the British is a very stiff upper lip.
00:50:47
S1: It's it's hard to say this is First World War. The film is called The War Below. It's the first time feature director JP Watts. It is the story of a group of mining engineers or digging engineers who are essentially conscripted by the by the army to come over to Europe and dig tunnels to get under the Germans because they badly losing the war in the trenches.
00:51:20
S3: Now, if that sounds like you've heard that plot before,
00:51:23
S1: there is another film that deals with the same story closer
00:51:26
S3: to home. Yes, beneath hill 60 from 2010 Jeremy Simmons film, which is essentially the same. Well, it's the same story, the same battle. And there are other. There were other miners as well, which is not actually mentioned in this film.
00:51:41
S1: No, it's not. It does sort of present it like Visigoths. But I guess what this film does that I don't remember beneath Hill 60 dealing with. It's very much about the class system in England and how the the military hierarchy really looks down on these guys because they dig sewers. Yeah. And and yet they become attorney. They bring about a turning point.
00:52:12
S3: But it's very safe. I mean, we've seen so it's very good. Yes. Sorry, very honest. I mean, it doesn't go very deep into those ideas you've seen and the tropes they played. It's true.
00:52:23
S1: Now we're going to talk about another film that you and I have seen. But before we do know British Film Festival would be complete without Timothy Spall.
00:52:33
S3: Oh yes.
00:52:34
S1: He's in three films in this festival. I've seen two of them, so he's in. He's in a film called The Last Bus, which he kind of ages up a little bit to play quite a adultery. Oh, that's a big look
00:52:48
S3: old enough already. Well, I thought so.
00:52:51
S1: But then the second film I saw, I've got quite a surprise because he always looked, Oh, he's of, this is a really lovely idea. He's a he's wife of many years dies. They live in John O'Groats, which is as far north in England as you can get. But their romance happened at Land's End in Cornwall, which is as far south as you can get. And he's got his big pension, a bus pass, and he decides to take her ashes and sprinkle them at Land's End, where their romance happened, travelling only on local buses from one end of the country to the other. The last
00:53:28
S3: time I looked know England is not that big,
00:53:30
S1: but
00:53:31
S3: you know these are these are people say it's not like from Townsville. So this is a sort
00:53:38
S1: of, I guess it's a vignette sort of film because what happens? It's a road movie. It is a road movie, and he meets people along the way. And kind of, well, I guess we get an insight into how he views the world and there's a parallel story it represents. It said it
00:53:54
S3: well.
00:53:56
S1: It's set in recent years, but it also tells the story of there as there of a second here. And the other film he's in is really, if you're a Peter Greenaway fan, this would be a film for you. If you're not, I'm not quite sure.
00:54:12
S3: I believe it's huge still out there
00:54:13
S1: to buy an Australian director called Daniel Graham. The film is called The Obscure Life of the Grand Duke of Corsica. Timothy Spall This time is a much younger kind of eccentric and curmudgeonly, but but cutting edge architect who was engaged by a billionaire who calls himself the Duke of Corsica, played by Peter has still, Marais is great in it, and he wants the architect to build him a mausoleum because he's dying.
00:54:47
S3: That sounds like a Peter Greenaway plot, if I ever it.
00:54:50
S1: So visually and narratively, it's very. Peter Greenaway says he's passed away as yeah, and there's a parallel story about a 13th century kind of St Francis of Assisi that kind of reflects on what is happening in the present day story and.
00:55:10
S3: A riff off a Glen, your lifestyle.
00:55:12
S1: Yes, yeah, yeah.
00:55:14
S3: Not a satire. Yes. Okay. Yeah. So we miss him now. We need to next his. Yeah. OK, fair enough. All right.
00:55:22
S1: I'll miss him. Now you and I both say boiling point. Oh yes. Set in a restaurant in Christmas week. High tension, high pressure. Great actor Stephen Graham and actor I really like who played Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire. It was in The Irishman, and he's a really good actor. He plays Andy, who's a sort of Britain hawk on the edge kind of head chef partner in this restaurant. It's sort of a bit on the edge as a restaurant and his nemesis, a television celebrity chef, is coming in tonight. And so the tensions that already exist amongst the staff with what the health department is putting on them and all those kind of things come to a head. And that tension is sort of embody because the whole thing's shot in a single shot
00:56:19
S3: and and a proper single shot as far as I can see it, like, Oh my God. 17 which might go for eight minutes.
00:56:26
S1: Yeah, no.
00:56:27
S3: This thing is fascinating to say. It looks like it's shot in real,
00:56:30
S1: so it in real time. It is a really interesting hybrid between film and theater. Yeah, because the performances are happening concurrently with the shooting of the film. Yeah. Not tomorrow will come back and shoot that scene. Yeah. And I found that just raised the tension in a really effective way.
00:56:51
S3: And I didn't know I felt like, I think there's a better film there if it was shot, giving the actors the opportunity to do better performances at times. That's how I felt.
00:57:06
S1: Yeah, and I didn't. You know, it may be. I love Stephen Graham and the single shot worked for me.
00:57:11
S3: Well, I'll give you an example of this, though, because of the conceit on it you never really get. You don't get close ups in this film. And Stephen Graham is a wonderfully in Inwood actor. He he doesn't do a lot. It's all in here, and I think you require close ups to see that you're coming.
00:57:30
S1: You're right, you don't get close up, but you do get you keep moving on. You know, I think there's some scenes between he and I just sort of played by Planet Robbins.
00:57:38
S3: I don't understand that. I don't understand what you think of bringing something to the film. I think it didn't bring much at all to the film, and I would rather see the film. I also think it's underwritten as well. So, you know, I was quite disappointed because I like Stephen Graham to it.
00:57:53
S1: Well, maybe people should go and see it for themselves,
00:57:56
S3: maybe make up their own
00:57:57
S1: mind because it is part of the British film and it's more we get to see. It's on at the moment that Kim Patel and I were talking about a very short time ago. We just tried to give him a little bit of a snapshot of eight of the films we've seen. But this much more, including a statement, was saying a really good seven from the 70s set of retrospective films. But we are out of time. Crazy is seems to often happen to us. Let me just say thanks to our guests tonight. Jeff Cobham from Brookmeyer Meyer phone Kim, Fatalis, you of course Mark Gracey. And thanks to Margaret F for producing, talk to you next week by.
