NFSA SAR FELLOWSHIP
W I D E R SCREENINGS TM presents...
AUSTRALIAN CINEMA / DVD
BOXING DAY (2007)
Siren Visual (region 4)
d. Kriv Stenders; pr. Kristian Moliere; scr. Richard Green, Kriv Stenders; ph. Kriv Stenders; ed. Gabriella Muir; prod d. Lisa Stonham; cast. Richard Green, Tammy Anderson, Syd Brisbane, Stuart Clark, Catriona Hadden, Misty Sparrow (80 mins)
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
DVD COVER ART
Digital Video & Parolee Experience from within the Australian Prison System
Director Kriv Stenders first met actor Richard Green when Stenders held auditions for actors within the NSW, Australia prison system for the film Two/Out.
Stenders’ subsequent film Blacktown interested Adelaide Film Festival Director Katrina Sedgewick and she asked Stenders to develop a digital video project for Festival funding. Stenders took the opportunity to once again collaborate with parolee Green, for Boxing Day. A local Adelaide production by Smoking Gun Productions, Boxing Day now follows up its festival screening with a deluxe collector’s edition DVD by Siren Visual who provide a welcome second disc of special features covering rehearsals, production history as well as the performance poetry of Green. An engaging commentary track adds much insight and by the end of this complete DVD package, the viewer is treated to not only a memorable Aussie film but a captivating look at its making, intentions and achievements as well as an insight into the people involved and what they hoped to achieve with the film.
PREVIEW
The fold-out special release packaging and extensive collector’s booklet help place this DVD amongst the best of contemporary Australian cinema on DVD.
_________________________________________
The Growing Influence of Reality Television on Australian Film
Boxing Day is a revelation of the influence of digital video and such reality television as Big Brother in low-budget Australian filmmaking.
Parolee Richard Green
It demonstrates with skill and talent the potential of one-location, small group of actors type intimate situational drama and in the end emerges as an intriguing social document, probing the believable tensions of its characters with an emphasis on authenticity in place and behaviour. Indeed, there is an attention to the minute behavioural details of everyday life amongst low-income suburban drug users and indigenous aboriginals that suggests Boxing Day as the latest in a line of Aussie social realist cinema. It is a long heritage to address, resonating with works from Pure S. in the 1970s to the more contemporary Little Fish, and Boxing Day does so with stylistic self-assurance.
Conceptually, Boxing Day is an ambitious undertaking. Shot entirely on digital video in a continuous take, it covers the real time morning and early afternoon reality of recent parolee Chris (Richard Green) as he deals with his drug-using mates, his niece and her mother. When he draws a gun on his sobbing mate and accuses him of something horrible, tensions threaten to explode into violence if he doesn’t calm his explosive temper before his niece gets home from the shops. But the niece breaks down in tears and her mother pleads with her that they can start a new life all afresh, the situation deteriorating with the inevitability of desperate lives on a tense edge when Chris’s parole officer arrives and they must conceal all.
Boxing Day manages a dramatic intensity in its second half, its digital video authenticity adding a raw humanity that is stark and confronting, making for dynamic but disturbing viewing as it proceeds.
However, its continuous take camera style leads to long passages of the routine drudgery of life at the beginning, leading to an arrhythmic sense of pace. Ordinary moments seem protracted and then erupt into energy bordering on violence, then again submerge into the droll reality of Adelaide suburbia. If you take to the film’s painstaking realism – offering attention to the ordinary rhythm and flow of real-time in close observation to non-actors improvising around a script – the immersion in this lower socio-economic reality and the human inter-personal tensions therein proves rewarding to the patient viewer. Slow realism, a realistic sense of place and cumulative human emotional tension have a captivating relationship in Boxing Day, making for a vibrant, powerful piece of moral relativism.This DVD of Boxing Day is definitely recommended to these with an interest in edgily realist, raw Australian filmmaking.
_________________________________________
DVD PURCHASE INFORMATION:
Boxing Day
RELATED AUSTRALIAN VIEWING SELECTIONS
