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Projecting its own image

Lawrie Zion

9 March 2005 - ADVENTUROUSLY programmed and well organised, the Adelaide Film Festival, which finished last Thursday, has earned its place within the ranks of the country's significant film events.

Held for only the second time, the two-week biennial festival has achieved this not through imitating the larger and more established Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane film festivals, but by strategically carving out its own niche.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the festival's backing of a new multimedia project called UsMob. This ambitious and unique venture, one of six projects to receive support from the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund, is harnessing the internet to tell stories about a group of Aboriginal teenagers living in Hidden Valley just outside Alice Springs.

While the premiere of UsMob was just one event in a crowded festival program, it was one of the high points of the fortnight.

The core of UsMob is seven short films, each of which explores a specific theme as seen through the eyes of its young protagonists, and each of which has several possible endings. How does the young Della react when she is teased at school for leaving her hearing aid at home? After seeing the main story played out, viewers can choose to watch three very different outcomes (all three were shown to the full house on the night of the launch).

The project, funded also by the Australian Film Commission, the ABC, the South Australian Film Corporation and Telstra, was created and directed by David Vadiveloo, an Alice Springs-based film-maker and lawyer who has been working with the local Aboriginal community for the past decade.

Vadiveloo says UsMob grew out of concerns from members of the Arrernte people of Alice Springs that their children weren't seeing accurate representations of themselves on Australian television. "So they go for African-American black culture instead of their own," he says.

As well as attempting to reverse this trend, UsMob is intended to help Aboriginal youth become more familiar with digital media.

"So many of the kids and adults are illiterate as it is, that the digital age presents as a barrier rather than as a new means of communication," says Vadiveloo.

"One of the project's aims is to build a site with stories about the kids themselves, stories they would want to be able to read and watch online, therefore encouraging them to learn to read and to learn computer skills." For those in remote communities with little or no web access, a DVD compilation of the series is planned, and a TV version is due to screen on the ABC later this year.

Vadiveloo says he has tried to keep his own, non-Aboriginal voice out of the series, which he co-wrote with an indigenous writer, Danielle MacLean.

Many of the episodes evolved out of everyday conversations between the young actors, most of whom had never appeared in front of a camera before.

"There has never been a series that has been voiced so purely by the subjects of the film," he says. As well as presenting stories online, the UsMob site (www.

usmob.com.au) is designed as a games hub, an information access point, and a place where teenagers can upload their own stories.

"I wanted youth to be able to discuss things in a forum, and to read fact sheets that give them real information, as well as seeing the episodes we had made," Vadiveloo says.

Just how UsMob will be experienced, on all its levels, by its target audience remains to be seen. But certainly the stories are striving to present an authenticity of tone and, despite occasional didactic moments, are providing a portrait of black Australian youth that is refreshingly different from those traditionally presented on the screen.

Another initiative unique to Adelaide is its partnership with the Australian International Documentary Conference, held during the first week. The cross-pollination between these two events ensured that the film festival had a conspicuously strong season of documentary films, and a program of forums with many of the directors. More than half the feature-length films in the festival were documentaries.

Highlights included the world premieres of Dennis O'Rourke's Landmines: A Love Story, a moving portrayal of a pair of newlyweds in post-Taliban Afghanistan; Cathy Henkel's profile of Spike Milligan, I Told You I Was Ill, which looks at the life of the comedian through the eyes of several of his family members, some of whom attended the gala screening; and Thomas Balmes's intriguing exploration of corporate ethics, A Decent Factory.

It's no reflection on the calibre of the international feature films that I'm saving discussion of them until last. For me, the best of these was the Mexican stand-off, Duck Season. This simple but unpredictable comedy, set in an apartment in Mexico City, involves a pair of 14-year-olds who refuse to pay a pizza delivery man, claiming he was a whole 14 seconds late bringing their Sunday snack to their door.

More oblique pleasures were on offer in Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's latest film, Cafe Lumiere, where a young Japanese writer discovers she is to become a single mother, much to the disapproval of her traditional parents; and in the French drama Kings and Queen, a slow but gripping tale about a pair of ex-lovers.

The fact that these and so many other films shown in Adelaide have yet to secure Australian distribution confirms the value of festivals as showcases for outstanding cinema. Let's hope that some or all of these films turn up in the Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane festivals this winter.

As with any film festival, not everything lived up to expectations. The closing night film, 2046, from Hong Kong's Wong Kar-wai, is an incoherent and pretentious follow-up to his enigmatic In the Mood for Love. And Roger Michell's Enduring Love was a surprisingly unengaging adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel.

But these are minor disappointments in a fortnight that delivered so much, extending our very notion of what a film festival can be.

Source: The Australian

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• Us Mob

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