KYD is proud to present a selection of film writing from the 2021 Melbourne Women in Film Festival’s Critics Lab. This program enables four emerging Australian film critics to interview filmmakers and panellists, network with industry folk, attend special screenings throughout the festival and learn from mentors Cerise Howard and Laura La Rosa.
Catch up on last year’s Critics Lab roundup, and for more great film writing from this year’s festival, check out the Critics Lab blog!
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Ruahine: Stories in her Skin
dir. Hiona Henare
The experience of watching Hiona Henare’s documentary Ruahine: Stories in Her Skin rings quietly with the same open-eyed tremor that ensues from becoming privy to a secret.
In Henare’s rural hometown of Levin in New Zealand’s North Island, the curious eye of her camera nestles itself within a crowd of mostly Māori women and children, an intergenerational congregation. Here, they gather for a ceremony where two Muaūpoko wāhine (women), Anahera Winiata and Janice Cherie Pania Eriha, will receive their traditional moko kauae—chin tattoos—from Henare’s cousin, Sian Montgomery-Neutze. With all the tender affection of a home video plus a cosmic magnitude, Henare’s film lulls viewers into the ceremony and lets them roost there for some forty minutes. A film of unassuming patience, it does not ask anything of its spectators other than that they be polite observers, unobtrusive flies on the wall.
The entirety of Ruahine is undergirded by the question of how one keeps their spirituality with them. Western religions often assert a dualism between the body and the spirit; here, one cherishes their creed through the exterior objects of their faith—tomes, necklaces, food. Overseeing the convergence of body and spirit through the inking of a tattoo, Ruahine overturns such presumptions with a cathartic deluge. To be tattooed is to willingly wound one’s skin. Yet, Ruahine is utterly painless. Ink to flesh, it exiles any wince or ache, remaining steadfast to its ode to Māori women celebrating the mana (spiritual power) of their whakapapa (ancestry). With the tattoo, a wāhine’s mana is made knowable on her skin’s canvas, proudly engraved on her being evermore; and all can see those black lines twist on her chin, rolling into the line of her lip like the soapy froth of an ocean break dashes into the shore. This mark is indelible.
Ruahine’s subtle radicalism lies in its generosity, its understanding of the power of telling one’s own story, plain and simple.
Still, much of Ruahine does not centre on the act of tattooing at all. Rather, the film’s subtle ferocity lingers in the candied minutiae of small exchanges, the kind whose significance only balloon with retrospection: eyes in reverie, nervously rummaging the roof; hands held under yellow light; a weight-lifted sigh. It is a sensitive exercise in naturalism that Ruahine offers. And with its pace nearing real time, it is one encrusted with an incredible sense of now-ness. The documentary’s shots are intentionally small, each one climbing from the material to the transcendental, accumulating in a thunderous vignette of wāhinetanga (womanhood) and whanaungatanga (family connection).
In Ruahine, Henare is offering a portrait of a place and its people that dances between poignancy and festivity with a delicate virtuosity. Its subtle radicalism lies in its generosity, its understanding of the power of telling one’s own story, plain and simple. It does not impose, only listens. How difficult a task it is to make explicable the inexplicable stuff of spirituality; and yet, Ruahine manages it with ease and song.
—Jess Zheng
The Weather Diaries
dir. Kathy Drayton
‘Someone else will fix it.’
‘I don’t think they will.’
Poetically impassioned by Tony Abbott’s climate denialism, Kathy Drayton’s The Weather Diaries documents the effects of the climate crisis in Sydney over a lengthy period from 2014 to 2019. Drayton’s sobering film begins at Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens. With a home-movie aesthetic, her hand-held camera takes us from flying fox deaths due to global warming, to experiments growing gum trees in predicted temperature increases.
In tandem with an urgent narration outlining the domino events of environmental collapse, Drayton films her child, Imogen, learning the violin. Their fingers dance along strings, bending but not breaking the delicate possible lifelines of the future.
Drayton is honest in her poeticism. It often feels as if the world is being seen from her eyes as a sombre environmentalist reporter by day and a family member by night. The banality of the everyday is balanced with the tragically irrecoverable. Car drives with Imogen lead to images of dead flying foxes crumpled like paper, Drayton’s narration and its accompanying images of climate change are interrupted by school shirts and breakfast. There can, however, be something left wanting in the lack of deliberate tonal intermeshing between home life and broader environmental issues.
The Weather Diaries shows that two things that should not exist simultaneously regrettably do: the promise of the future and the promise of its destruction.
For example, as Drayton documents Imogen Jones moulding into their musical moniker ‘Lupa J.’ she keeps this structurally separate from her environmental reportage. Blending these worlds could have made the film’s argument more potent. The narrative voiceover regarding climate collapse is shockingly abrupt and emotive in the beginning, but it soon becomes too heavy for me. Yet, just as the early 2019 bushfires raged to the point of being too overwhelming to comprehend, perhaps this feeling is simply a reflection of a burnt-out audience.
Though it can be uncomfortable, there is beauty in the film’s persistence in documenting climate change. The Weather Diaries’ efficacy lies in its refusal to romanticise climate change and disaster. Despite the feeling of disjointedness that exists in the structural flitting between climate change reportage and the relaxed filming of domesticity, it shows that two things that should not exist simultaneously regrettably do: the promise of the future and the promise of its destruction.
—Sarah Jasem
Welcome to Wee Waa
dir. Madeline McGrady
Proud Gomeroi elder Madeline McGrady directs Welcome to Wee Waa (1983), the historic feature-length documentary following land rights campaigns, and marking the first film on Indigenous deaths in custody in so-called Australia.
Raised on a mission, with no financial support for films, McGrady self-taught filmmaking as a medium for their storytelling and activism. Their credits include We Fight (1982), Stand Up For Your Rights (1987) and Always Was, Always Will Be (1987), an unprecedented body of work that documents events of ongoing resistance from First Nations people.
Welcome to Wee Waa is a staunch retrospective in the MWFF line-up. Almost 40 years on, the film burns with the fact that Indigenous deaths in custody have near tripled since its production. McGrady challenges audiences to root themselves and learn from this history, being an early teacher in how racism and dispossession of the land go hand in hand. 1983 was the advent of the Hawke-Keating Labor government killing off land rights campaigns, leaving a smokescreen of ‘recognition’ and ‘reconciliation’ in the place of redistributive action.
The film opens on Gomeroi Country, where the Wee Waa local council are attempting to displace Indigenous cotton workers off Tulladunna Reserve, on the basis of ‘unsightly’ grounds. Aboriginal custodians and allies resist, ‘we just have to squat on the land and refuse to be moved’.
Seeing Welcome to Wee Waa in 2021 demands a space held for grief, hope and action all at the same time.
Welcome to Wee Waa then documents the death in custody of 21-year-old Kamilaroi man, Eddie Murray in 1981, after being incarcerated for public drunkenness. The insidious hypocrisy of being detained for one’s own protection, yet facing police violence and murder, echoes through the shocked grief of the family interviewed. John Murray, Eddie’s brother, recalls, ‘I just collapsed to the floor at the police station and I couldn’t believe it’.
Whilst its abolition was a key recommendation of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991, public drunkenness was not decriminalised in Victoria until 2020. Summary offences disproportionately target First Nations people. There is no accountability for police violence while police continue to investigate police.
On Darug Country, McGrady moves with crowds with a practiced hand, producing characteristically fluid, euphoric, electric-blue-hued montages of land rights protesters. The Indigenous Australian flag is held in almost constant appearance, and dance and music by youth fill the streets. Seeing Welcome to Wee Waa in 2021 demands a space held for grief, hope and action all at the same time. McGrady reminds, land back is a verb. Visibility and healing can come from embodying these archives.
—Lara Fielding
Brazen Hussies
dir. Catherine Dwyer
Brazen Hussies, directed by Catherine Dwyer, details a historic chapter of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Australia, starting at its roots in 1965, up until 1975. This documentary recounts the trials and tribulations of feminism in Australia, combined with contemporary interviews from some of the leading women of the feminist movement during this period. The film’s use of archival photos, footage, and flyers transport you to a time filled with riotous upheaval towards the status quo; this rebellion is further emphasised by a punk rock soundtrack paired with protests from the past. Most notably it focuses on how the feminist ideals filtered through the national conscious further enacting political change. As such, the film spends a significant time into the work of Elizabeth Reid, who served as an advisor for women’s affairs under former Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, and the programs set up to help and enrich the lives of women in Australia.
Brazen Hussies marks Dwyer’s directorial debut, however, she is no stranger to the genre after working on the feminist documentary She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry (2014), which similarly tackles the rise of the American Women’s Liberation Movement from 1966 to 1971. Although Brazen Hussies champions the achievements seen through the feminist movement, Dwyer also offers criticism of the feminist ideals during Australia’s second wave of feminism. The film addresses the inherent racism and homophobia that was prevalent within the movement, with archival footage showing how marginalised women struggled to find a place and have their voices heard. However, this is as far as the discussion goes. Although it makes time for these issues, it superficially brushes over the surface and the progression of the overall story can seem jarring.
Brazen Hussies arrives at no better time as an urgent reminder that the fight for women’s rights is unfortunately still far from over.
Despite its minor flaws, Brazen Hussies is a lesson in Australian feminism that women should endeavour to experience. The film takes its time in recognising and taking pride in the accomplishments of all who protested for women’s rights which ultimately resulted in a permanent change to the role of women in society. Given the abhorrent behaviour from members of the government regarding the sexual assault of Brittany Higgins at the time of writing this, this film arrives at no better time as an urgent reminder that the fight for women’s rights is unfortunately still far from over. Brazen Hussies is the film we need to keep the burning flame of rebellion alight.
—Laura Mansted
