TOM ZUBRYCKI is an Australian filmmaker whose award-winning documentaries have for the past 45 years mapped this nation’s changing social and political landscape.
SENSES OF CINEMA
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.
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.
Rembetika music or the Greek blues is a music of the streets and a music of refugees. In this essay style documentary filmmaker Mary Zournazi explores the heart and soul of Rembetika music through peoples’ stories of love, loss and belonging, as well as her own. (Producer: Tom Zubrycki)
Opera singer Tiriki Onus sets out to uncover the mystery surrounding the life of his Indigenous grandfather, William Bill Onus – charismatic Aboriginal cultural leader, entrepreneur, theatre impresario and, probably, the first Indigenous filmmaker. (Directors: Alec Morgan and Tiriki Onus, Producer: Tom Zubrycki)
Sydney filmmaker Kathy Drayton muses on what the future holds for her musician daughter amidst the threats of climate change and mass extinction. (Producer: Tom Zubrycki)
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.
Australia’s vast and unspoiled Kimberley region is under threat, with mining, pastoralism and irrigated agriculture driving an unprecedented land grab. What will be left of over 200 remote Aboriginal communities?
ARTICLES
Platform Papers – Quarterly Essays on the Performing Arts 2019
Documentaries matter now more than ever. Documentary storytelling is a vital way to explore our world and who we are as a nation. In this they are as much an art form as about real life—and that’s sufficient reason for them to have a strong cultural imperative.
A STUDY OF TOM ZUBRYCKI’S MOLLY & MOBARAK
Kate Nash, Studies in Film, University of Tasmania 2010
Power represents a problem for documentary, raising questions about the politics and ethics of representation. In this article the notion of power in documentan; is explored. The influence of domination as a model for power relations within documentary is challenged and a Foucauldian notion of power relationships suggested as an alternative way of conceptualising the documentary-maker participant relationship.
BY PAUL BYRNES on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Sydney Film Festival.
Tom Zubrycki attended his first Sydney Film Festival around 1970. He remembers loving Ken Loach’s films Cathy Come Home and Family Life. Most of his documentaries since 1981 have screened at the festival. Former SFF Festival Director Paul Byrnes sat down with him to talk about the relationship between the Festival and documentary films, especially his own.