the Curb

A brilliant circus family’s hidden legacy unfolds as descendants reunite across continents, revealing their Australian Aboriginal ancestry, global stardom, and the extraordinary secrets they kept in order to survive. The greatest entertainment on earth in the 1900s was the circus and its performers were the global superstars. The big top transported children and adults alike into a world where anything was possible.

Con Colleano, ‘t...

Documentarian Yaaa Bou Melhem expands her approach to collaborative documentary storytelling with her latest feature Yurlu | Country. This essential film follows the final year of the life of Aboriginal elder Maitland Parker as he continues his decades long fight to heal his homeland after the scarification from the caustic asbestos mines in Wittenoom which left the area as the largest contaminated site in the Southern Hemisphere.

S...

Sophie Somerville is an Australian emerging filmmaker whose short films Linda 4 Eva and Peeps made waves at film festivals around the world. Now with her feature film debut Fwends, winner of the Berlinale Forum's Caligari Film Prize for Innovation, Sophie firmly makes her mark on Australian cinema as a talent to watch out for.

As Cody Allen wrote in their review, Fwends is 'a tender portrait of friendship, loss and rediscovery' and ...

In this podcast, Nadine Whitney speaks with documentarians Maggie Miles & Trisha Morton-Thomas about the extraordinary documentary Journey Home, David Gulpilil.

Journey Home, David Gulpilil is a sacred film which brings us into the funerary customs and that informed David's life. Maggie and Trisha follow David's remains from South Australia all the way to east Arnhem Land and along the way we see the impact that David had on not...

Writer-Director Adrian Ortega's Westgate follows Netta (Sarah Nicolazzo) and her son Julian (Max Nappo) as she embarks on a torturous day of navigating hospitals, family, cultural prejudices, and more, all as she faces the threat of eviction and the ever rising debts that keep her and her son trapped in a class struggle.

This is a film written from a lived-in perspective, with Adrian pulling from his own life to craft a tale that ac...

Aussie genre filmmaking legend Kiah Roache-Turner is back with his latest flick, Beast of War, a WW2 story of soldiers fighting for their lives on a different kind of battlefield: the shark infested waters of the open ocean.

In the above interview, Kiah talks about the journey to getting Beast of War on screen, how the impact of Spielberg meant that he had to shoot the film in Australia, and what creating the giant water tank to sho...

Bina Bhattacharya is a creative storyteller whose work I've been following for a while now. Her 2017 short film Wild Dances embraced music and cultural identity against the backdrop of Eurovision, while her section in the exemplary anthology film Here Out West, titled The Eternal Dance, is the story from that film that has left the deepest mark on me. 

Music plays a major role in Bina's filmmaking, and it's another prominen...

Julie Pacino’s dark fairytale I Live Here Now is a powerful and complex debut feature that places the audience in the space between dream and nightmare as Rose (Lucy Fry) finds herself in an impossible but familiar hotel where she confronts the shadows and scars of her psyche.

Featuring unforgettable supporting cast including Madeleine Brewer, Matt Rife, and the iconic Sheryl Lee: I Live Here Now is a battle for individuation an...

With two feature films under his belt, Samuel Van Grinsven has quickly become a vital voice in Australian cinema. His feature debut, the lurid and sumptuous 2019 queer drama Sequin in a Blue Room, utilised neon lights and lingering shots of yearning to amplify the sense of lead actor Conor Leach's youthful Sequin finding his place in a new, inviting world.

With his follow up feature, Went Up the Hill, Samuel, alongside regular co-wr...

The Sydney Underground Film Festival is back once more for another stellar year of underground, fringe cinema, short films and more. This years line-up includes an array of gloriously wild films including Fucktoys by Annapurna Sriram, Queens of the Dead by Tina Romero, Stelarc - Suspending Disbelief, The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man, Take48 shorts, and more. 

In the following chat with festival director Nathan Senn, I chat to him ab...

Writer, director, and actor Jessica Husband teams up with co-director Ethan Finch to craft the powerful short film Zombie. Jessica Husband plays Claire, a woman who sits on a picnic blanket on a cliffside, waiting for someone to arrive. She turns to her phone, listening to a voicemail from her partner Ted, the words he says provides Zombie with a weight that opens up the films themes of loss and grief.

In the following interview wit...

Whether it be loneliness, solitude, finding sanctuary in a stifled relationship or waiting for a takeaway meal, or maybe one of the most precious things of all, the comfort in creating for ones self, Kaite Fitz is shifting how we see ourselves on screen. Her short film Smoke, which premiered at the St Kilda Film Festival, presents Lianne Mackessy's main character, a woman who moves through her day, quietly being hollowed out by a v...

Filmmaker David Robinson-Smith is one of the major voices of the new Australian film industry. His films include Mud Crab, We Used to Own Houses, and his latest effort, The Shirt Off Your Back, each an essential entry in an increasingly vital filmography.

When we talk about this 'new wave of Australian filmmakers', a term which I'm starting to lean towards calling 'the rising swell of modern Australian cinema' - it doesn't role ...

When Nadine Whitney interviewed actor Frank Mosley, she started their chat with a game akin to Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Want to know how to get to Meryl Streep from Frank? Easier than even Frank probably thinks. Frank starred in Geoff Marslett’s Quantum Cowboys which also featured Alex Cox. Alex Cox directed Ed Harris in Walker. Ed also features in Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of The Hours.

Frank is usually a supporting or charact...

In their first conversation Nadine and Virat speak about two films which are pilgrimages of a sort. Kasimir Burgess’ Iron Winter, a documentary that takes the viewer into a land rarely seen — that of the nomadic Mongolian horse herders. An immersive and intimate piece of cinema which invites people to see a dying ancient tradition undertaken on the Mongolian Steppes during a five month journey herding horses to viable snow covered ...

'Art is labour'. This is a statement from composer Jung Jae-il, the man behind the iconic scores to Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, Okja, and Mickey 17, the Netflix smash hit Squid Game, and Hirokazu Kore-eda's Broker, amongst other works. For Jung Jae-il, the art of composing a score is work.

For Jung Jae-il, artists like Roxette, Metallica and Björk are notable influences on his work, with Pina Bausch's dancing leaving a lingering mark o...

When documentarian Shalom Almond received access to document a group of women prisoners training retired greyhounds to become house-friendly pets for her 2017 film Prisoners and Pups, she opened up a door to be able to capture the hidden stories of women prisoners in Australian jails. Prisoners and Pups is a gentle film that shows the power of rehabilitation programs in prisons, not just for the prisoners, but also for the greyhoun...