When a rock band enjoys a career of 45 years and sells more than 20 million albums, they probably qualify as legends. They may also be overdue for a documentary, an omission that has now been corrected by director Paul Clarke, who has spent the past seven years making Midnight Oil: The Hardest Line, which opened this year’s Sydney Film Festival.

That may sound like a long haul, but another Australian documentary maker, James Bradley, has just unveiled a film on artist, Jiawei Shen, called Welcome to Babel, that took 12 years to complete.