FILMS as director
FILMS
In mid 60’s in Australia and around the world artists and filmmakers organised filmmakers cooperatives supporting self-managed production, distribution and exhibition. The Co-ops nurtured Australia’s cinema renaissance and created new markets for strikingly innovate Australian content. It was a time that was rich, reckless and rewarding.
Gardens of Stone is short documentary which tells a story of the efforts of traditional owners, bushwalkers and scientists to save a landscape of spectacular sandstone towers from the impact of underground mining. It calls for a conservation reserve right on the doorstep of the town of Lithgow, a town which for decades has been the epicentre of a community servicing the areas many coal mines.
A refugee from the Sudanese civil war, Zacharia (one of the ‘lost boys’ of Sudan) lives in Sydney, Australia, with his wife and children. He desperately wants to do something for his Sudanese village, now in the newly created nation of South Sudan. His dream is to build a much-needed school.
The Pacific nation of Kiribati will be one of the world’s first nations to disappear as a result of climate change. Maria Tiimon, a Kiribati woman living in Sydney, has the task of alerting the world to her sinking homeland. Shy at first, we watch her grow in confidence as she takes her country’s message to the world.
Fadi Rahman is young, charismatic and ambitious. With the help of a team of Lebanese volunteers, he runs a youth centre and gymnasium in Sydney's west. The Centre, which has no government funding, is struggling in the face of council planning regulations and funding shortfalls. Fadi sets out to solve all their problems with the help of three determined, but often argumentative, cohorts.
In 1965, as Hanoi faced the threat of massive US bombing, students and teachers from the conservatorium of music fled to the countryside, where they built an entire campus underground: this is their story.
A young refugee from Afghanistan Mobarak Tahiri finds work in a small Australian country town and falls in love with local girl Molly.
Mobarak is one of 3,500 illegal boat people from the Hazara ethnic minority who arrived on the coast of Northern Australia between 1999 and 2001 fleeing persecution from the Taliban.
The Secret Safari tells the story of one of the most audacious military operations in the armed fight against apartheid in South Africa. A character-driven journey of courage and suspense with reconstructions of events using the original participants.
The Diplomat follows freedom fighter and Nobel Prize winner Jose Ramos Horta in the final tumultuous year of his 24 year campaign to secure independence for his country of East Timor.
The dramatic repercussions of a serious act of racially-motivated violence. The victims are a Lebanese family living in an outer-Sydney suburb. Their teenage son, Billal is run-down by a car sustaining massive brain injury. The film, shot over a period of 15 months, follows the dramatic twists and turns in the life of the family as they slowly come to terms with this traumatic event.
HOMELANDS is a portrait of a marriage, the story of Maria and Carlos, refugees from the war in El Salvador who have settled in suburban Melbourne.
BRAN NUE DAE is a documentary about the musical of the same name. The film is structured around two main elements: the production of the musical and the life of its creator Jimmy Chi. Both elements are interwoven with key participants in the musical, people important in Jimmy's life, and archival footage.
In the 1980s, Lord Alistair McAlpine, a larger-than-life romantic, arrived from England creating a whole new civilisation in Australia's North beginning with Broome. ls he to be regarded as the clever hunter mesmerising his prey, or should he be welcomed as the most sensitive and intelligent developer this country has yet encountered?
A feature documentary about the history of the trade union movement in Australia released in controversial circumstances by the filmmaker. The film takes an oral history approach and includes interviews with unionists and historians.
The emergence of the New Right as a force to be reckoned with in Australian politics had its origins in one of the most bitter and protracted disputes in Australian labor history - the 1985 Queensland Power Dispute.
The film deals with one of the most determined attempts by workers to challenge the right of companies to make mass dismissals of workers on solely economic pretexts. In September 1982, at the height of the economic recession, Australian Iron and Steel, a subsidiary of Australia's largest company BHP, announced its intention to retrench 400 miners from six coal pits which supplied the company's Wollongong steelworks.
Waterloo - a 50 minute documentary completed in 1981, is an historical account of the 1970’s battle by residents of this inner Sydney suburb to save the area from slum clearance and redevelopment by public housing authorities. In the early 70’s the state government initiated a massive scheme to pull down inner city terraces (‘slums’) to build new high rise public housing estates.