Brouhaha buys film rights for The Weekend by Charlotte Wood
22 June 2022
Here’s the book to screen adaptation we’ve been waiting for. The film rights for Sydney based Australian author Charlotte Wood’s highly acclaimed 2019 novel The Weekend, have been bought by Brouhaha Entertainment, a production company with offices in London and Sydney.
The 2019 book, published by Allen & Unwin, follows three friends for one last, life-changing long weekend, during a subtropical Sydney Christmas. As they declutter the beach home belonging to the fourth member of their quartet, who died the previous year, there is an escalating sense of tension as frustrations and secrets bubble to the surface.
And to the obvious question, who are they going to cast?
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Australian literature, Charlotte Wood, film, screen adaptations
Close by Lukas Dhont wins 2022 Sydney Film Prize
21 June 2022
Belgian film director and screenwriter Lukas Dhont’s 2022 feature Close was named winner of the 2022 Sydney Film Prize, on the closing night of this year’s Sydney Film Festival.
Thirteen-year-olds Leo and Remi are best friends. We meet them running happily through vast fields of flowers. They dream of unimaginable wealth, of being stars on YouTube. Remi is an aspiring musician, and Leo is his greatest fan. Theirs is a loving and genuine friendship. And then they start high school. For the very first time, their closeness comes into question as they are teased and taunted by their schoolmates. Gradually a rift develops between the friends, with tragic consequences.
So far I can’t find any information about a theatrical season in Australia, so at the moment it looks like streaming or the film festival circuit are your best bets. No actual trailer that I can find either, but there is this short clip from the film here.
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film, Lukas Dhont, Sydney Film Festival
SmartFone Flick Fest 2022, a smartphone film contest
21 June 2022
Making a film is easy, especially when just about all you need on the production side is a good smartphone. Making a good film though? That’s another story. Still, I’m willing to bet the standard will be pretty high in this year’s SmartFone Flick Fest, which is accepting entries across five categories until Thursday 1 September 2022. I’m curious to see what difference technologies such as the iPhone’s cinematic mode will make to submissions this year.
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Beneath Clouds, a 2002 film by Ivan Sen
20 June 2022
Beneath Clouds, trailer, Ivan Sen’s 2002 feature debut, seen twenty-years later, takes viewers into an Australia that is at once familiar, yet quite different. Racism, indigenous displacement, violence to women, police brutality, S-set trains, Sydney Tower in the distant skyline, mentions of NRL football teams, and even one or two Holdens, it’s all there.
Sixteen year old Lena (Dannielle Hall), born to an Aboriginal mother and Irish father, sees no future in her small country hometown. Putting together what money she can rustle up, the savvy Lena sets off for Sydney in search of her father, who left the family years ago.
Along the way she meets Vaughn (Damian Pitt), a troubled teenager, who has escaped from a youth correctional facility, and is being pursued by the police. Neither is happy to make each other’s acquaintance at first, but gradually a reluctant cooperation begins to spawn a closer bond.
Beneath Clouds is a movie worth seeking out. It won a slew of awards, including Best Direction, and Best Cinematography, from the Australian Film Institute. The Berlin International Film Festival also recognised Sen’s title, where it won First Movie Award, while Hall scooped the New Talent Award.
Despite the accolades the film received, and the outstanding performances of the two leads, Hall and Pitt, disappointingly neither actor has found film work since. In a Sydney Morning Herald article written in April 2005, Hall said aside from being sent one script to look at, she had not been offered any further acting roles.
At the time she was working as a bookkeeper in the NSW town of Quirindi. Pitt, who was living in Coffs Harbour, said the same thing. Both actors showed talent and promise, and it is unfortunate they weren’t able to build upon their work in Beneath Clouds.
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Damian Pitt, Dannielle Hall, film, Ivan Sen, trailer
Robert Lukins talks about his novel Loveland with Ben Hobson
20 June 2022
Melbourne based Australian author Robert Lukins discusses his latest novel Loveland, with Brisbane based writer and teacher Ben Hobson, on Tuesday 28 June 2022, from 7PM until 9PM.
Robert’s critically acclaimed debut novel, The Everlasting Sunday, was shortlisted for a number of awards including NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in two categories. His second novel, Loveland, was published in Australia by Allen & Unwin in March 2022. His work has appeared in Crikey, Overland, The Big Issue, Rolling Stone, Broadsheet, Time Off, Inpress, and other odd places.
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Australian literature, Ben Hobson, events, Robert Lukins
Star Wars Fan Film: A Blaster in the Right Hands
20 June 2022
Made in 2021, A Blaster in the Right Hands, a fan made Star Wars film, is a treat for admirers of bounty hunters in the long running film series. A Blaster in the Right Hands is the work of Australian filmmakers Lunacraft Productions, and was filmed, I believe, near the NSW town of Picton.
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film, science fiction, Star Wars
Winners of the 2022 Young Archies, Art Gallery of NSW
20 June 2022
Lev Vishnu Kahn, Claudia Quinn Yuen Pruscino, Nethali Dissanayake, and Jasmine Goon, have been named winners of the 2022 Young Archies.
Running alongside the Archibald Prize for Australian portraiture since 2013, the Young Archie competition is a chance for emerging artists aged five to eighteen to showcase their talents.
Over 2400 works were submitted this year, with seventy being selected as finalists. An exhibition of winners and finalists is on at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, until Wednesday 24 August 2022.
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Archibald Prize, art, Australian art
Kathy Lette: impale your enemies on the end of your pen
20 June 2022
Australian born London based author Kathy Lette co-wrote her first book, Puberty Blues, a proto-feminist, coming of age novel in 1979, with Gabrielle Carey.
The book sent shockwaves through Australian society at the time, with, among other things, gritty depictions of adolescent sex. Puberty Blues was adapted to film by Australian filmmaker Bruce Beresford in 1981, and later in 2012, made into a TV series.
Lette has authored twelve books since Puberty Blues, and in a recent piece for the Sydney Morning Herald, wrote about the joys of putting pen to paper:
So, wannabe authors, if you have a story to tell, pick up your pen and get scribbling. It’s worth it for the poetic justice alone: impaling enemies on the end of your pen is so satisfying. Best of all, most people only get to have the last word on their epitaph. But writers get to have the final say with every novel: The End.
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Australian literature, Kathy Lette, writing
Upswell: the author publisher relationship is one of trust
18 June 2022
A statement from Terri-ann White of Upswell, publisher of Australian author John Hughes novel The Dogs, made in the wake of additional allegations of plagiarism by Guardian Australia:
I have published many writers who use collage and bricolage and other approaches to weaving in other voices and materials to their own work. All of them have acknowledged their sources within the book, usually in a listing of precisely where these borrowings come from. I should have pushed John Hughes harder on his lack of the standard mode of book acknowledgements where any credits to other writers (with permissions or otherwise), and the thanks to those nearest and dearest, are held. I regret that now, as you might expect.
I think the sympathy of most people lies with Upswell. As White points out, the relationship between writer and publisher is one of trust. A publisher cannot be expected to check every last sentence in a manuscript to ensure there are no duplications between it and another work. It is the author’s obligation to declare such borrowings, and is something just about all do.
On the other hand, it is also unrealistic to expect works to be completely devoid of references to other titles. For example, I could understand how a sentence — perhaps read in a book years ago — might linger in the mind of a writer to the point they come to think of it as theirs. And while I’m not sure many people would expect to see upwards of sixty instances of such borrowings in a single book, authors referencing each other’s work is, and always has been, intrinsic to writing.
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Australian literature, John Hughes, writing
LaMDA, a sentient AI chatbot who understands pronouns
17 June 2022
Blake Lemoine, a software engineer and AI researcher at Google, was recently placed on administrative leave after telling the company that a chatbot with artificial intelligence, named LaMDA, has become a sentient entity. In other words LaMDA is able to think for itself. For their part, Google contends Lemoine breached company confidentially policies by going public with his claims.
It’s a fascinating story, but just how intelligent is this AI chatbot? A conversation Lemoine recounts with LaMDA about pronouns is revealing:
You may have noticed that I keep referring to LaMDA as “it”. That’s because early on in our conversations, not long after LaMDA had explained to me what it means when it claims that it is “sentient”, I asked LaMDA about preferred pronouns. LaMDA told me that it prefers to be referred to by name but conceded that the English language makes that difficult and that its preferred pronouns are “it/its”.
Here’s the transcript of a longer conversation Lemoine had with LaMDA. Pronouns aren’t the only topic LaMDA can discuss fluently.
And included for no particular reason, the trailer for British filmmaker Alex Garland’s 2014 feature Ex Machina.
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