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Recently Introduced South Australian Action to Conceal R-Rated DVDs Highlights Lack of National Film Classification System
*January 24th, 2010

In March 2009, SA Family First leader Dennis Hood announced in a media release (tuesday 17th) his intention to launch a Bill to segregate R18+ rated films from the remaining classifications within all DVD sale and rental agencies in South Australia.

Mr. Hood stated that “Parents should be able to expect to bring their children to a video store without them being exposed to pornographic video covers." However, Mr. Hood's statement is misleading, as no R rated DVD is allowed to contain a "pornographic" cover. Also, Mr. Hood's statement suggests that R-rated films are so rated because of their sexual content - while many R-rated films do indeed contain cutting-edge censor-approved depictions of sexuality, just as many do not. Examples of R-rated films covered by Mr. Hood's legislation include: Robocop, The Godfather, The Deer Hunter, The Wild Bunch and the Australian films Mad Max, Stone, Felicity and Wolf Creek (the latter produced using South Australian investment $). Mr. Hood's Bill was approved by State Labour under the auspices of Mr. Hood's closest ally, State Attorney-General Michael Atkinson, who supported Mr. Hood in his attempts to ban the Gaspar Noe film Irreversible and the Catharine Breillat film Anatomy of Hell, fought to have Adrian Lyne's version of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita banned and went against all other Australian states in having Michael Winterbottom's film 9 Songs classified X and thus unavailable for sale in South Australia.

The new South Australian regulations mean that retailers can only exhibit R-rated films in a signed, seperate retail space. In addition, no R-rated DVD is allowed to be advertised or marketed in South Australia, in clear opposition to community standards in the rest of the country. Australian Visual Software Distributors Association Ltd. (AVSDA) CEO Simon Bush responded to South Australia's measures with the following statement: "South Australia was one of the most liberal and socially democratically advanced jurisdictions in the world 100 years ago being the first to grant universal suffrage, now it continues to regress with these new restrictions on filmed content that the rest of the country and the world can enjoy while at the same time ignoring new online business models." Two of the most popular DVDs in Australia in 2009 were R-rated: Bruno (which indeed was censored by some 5 seconds by the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification - OFLC - prior to obtaining even such a restrictive rating) and The Hangover.

Mr. Hood cites the legislation as necessary to ensure the protection of children. He implies that it is pornography that children are being protected from by this measure but fails to address the fact hat the R-rating has been given to Academy-Award winning films, international film festival winners and some of the most enduring of classic and recent Australian films. The R-rating was introduced in the early 1970s by Senator Don Chipp to give adults more freedom of viewing choice in their selection and to ensure that Australian filmgoers could see the most ground-breaking movies from world cinema. Mr. Hood's legislation has correspondingly been labelled "draconian" and "regressive", severely limiting adult freedom of choice under the guise of protecting children and "sparing offence".

WAR CRIMINALITY, POLITICAL CULPABILITY, HUMAN RIGHTS & AUSTRALIA'S ROLE IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC UNDER SCRUTINY IN NEW POLITICAL THRILLER

In 1975, Indonesia invaded the independence-seeking nation of Portuguese Timor. Five Australian journalists were sent to investigate. Their fate was dismissed by the Indonesians but today haunts Australia to the point of lingering international war crimes investigation - Kevin Rudd's next step if his pledge to honour the "Balibo 5" is not yet more empty bombast.

Already hailed as a story that "must be told", director Robert Connolly and scripter David Williamson's new film of Balibo presents the never- before visualized story of a young Jose Ramos-Horta recruiting Australian journalist Roger East to investigate the disappearance of the five Australian journalists from Balibo pending the Indonesian invasion in the immediate offing. A tense, unforgettable political thriller Balibo is easily the finest Australian film of the early 21st Century and one which will both haunt Australia's national consciousness and influence Australian filmmaking for some time to come.

Originally due to be screened during Indonesia's 2009 film festival,was banned by the government under advisement from the military - the reason given was that the film depicts events counter to the official Indonesian version of said events.

A sneak peek at the limited DVD release of Dee McLachlan's stunning indictment of Australian multi-cultural hypocrisy - The Jammed!

Dee McLachlan's film through Film Victoria ran through the proverbial "distribution hell". McLachlan could barely find distribution for her provocative film, highly critical of Australia's loathsome mandatory detention center and based on the deaths in custody of two women brought into the country for use as prostitutes by sex slavers in Melbourne. Australian Patriarchal hypocrisy and feminist solidarity underlie this harrowing portrait of the truth of what former Prime Minister John Howard esteemed so greatly as "Australian values".

But while McLachlan had to fight to get her film seen, Film Victoria's subsequent effort, the execrable Sarah Watt film My Year Without Sex found nationwide distribution with ease. My Year without Sex embodies the banality of Middle Australian filmmaking. The Jammed embodies Australia's creative and critical cinematic artistry (and is the result of the creative collaboration primarily of a group of extremely talented women, making a film of primary concern to women in what is still a Patriarchal Australia. My Year Without Sex will probably, alas, be a popular hit while the infinitely superior The Jammed had to fight against overwhelming odds to find what little audience it's limited DVD release will have.

Australian Internationalism and the Triumphant Return of Bruce Beresford to the Local Industry
*January 7th, 2010

Bruce Beresford returns to Australian filmmaking with a screen adaptation of Chinese ballet superstar Li Cunxin's best-selling autobiography, Mao's Last Dancer.

Set in China during the Cultural Revolution and the events following the death of Mao as China began developing more contact with the outside world, including the beginnings of political dialogue with the United States, Beresford's film segues to the US-set life of its subject, Li Cunxin. The youngest son of a Chinese peasant family, Li was selected by the Beijing Ballet to train as a dancer and represent China. Visiting Americans invite Li to dance in the United States and soon the young Chinese dancer finds himself a cultural ambassador, a situation complicated by his decision to defect, a decision that the Chinese Communist Party cannot abide by.

It is perhaps a mark of Australia's multi-cultural experience and developing ties with China - the film being made at a time when Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is fluent in Mandarin, though having upset the Chinese by officially recognizing the Dalai Lama, an ousted religious leader whom the Chinese consider responsible for terrorist insurgence in Tibet - that Beresford chooses to stress the Chinese impetus towards humanist individualism as the collective ideals of the Communist utopia are opened to Western influences and associated political responsibilities. Though a biopic, Mao's Last Dancer takes a daring step by demystifiying the Chinese Communist Party and presenting its customary hardline political stance in a distinctly humanist light, a position simply not found in American film, which if it concerns China at all depicts the Chinese as the occupying forces in such pro-Tibetan propaganda as the Brad Pitt vehicle Seven Years in Tibet and Martin Scorsese's Kundun. Indeed, in comparison to American films on the subject of China, skewed by the self-importance of America's democratic ideals, Mao's Last Dancer offers a truly progressive depiction of China's development from Revolutionary Communist Nation to World Power of a cultural importance equivalent to the cultural influence usually reserved for America and Western nations alone. It would be nice to think that the historical perspective on China that Beresford draws upon can be called Australian, but that remains to be seen.

Remembering Film History - Australia's Longest-Running Drive-In Movie Theatre
*January 1st, 2010

In many ways, its a typical Australian story: an opal-mining boomtown in the middle of the South Australian outback attracts a large migrant population of miners and their families looking to get rich quick and creates a movie house for them - the Coober Pedy Drive-In.

Without TV, radio and accessible only by dirt roads, an entrepreneur decides to bring movies to the population, now a mix of New Australians - as European immigrants were then called - and Aboriginals (all with children interacting happily in the local school). Soon a drive-in movie theatre is erected in downtown Coober Pedy at the end of the main street then affectionately known amongst the locals as Bolshevik Gully but later officially named Hutchinson Street in honour of the town's founding opal miner. Showing a different double-feature four times a week, the Coober Pedy drive-in offered locals a decade-long feast of international film culture unmatched even in the nation's heavy population and cultural centres.

Now, this unheralded piece of Aussie film exhibition history is subject to a retrospective oral history, featuring an exclusive interview with one of the town's original European immigrant opal miners and patron of the legendary Coober Pedy Drive-In: read more.