Chance meeting at Bali cafe leads to main role in Aussie short film

Frank Magree had a lot weighing on his mind when a hand pulled back the chair next to him at a busy Canggu cafe. The AK-47s hadn’t arrived and he still needed to cast one of the main characters in his film, a wet-behind-the-ears GI. He’d exhausted local modelling agencies. In desperation, he was about to start dropping flyers at local hostels.

This boy, politely asking if he could share the table, looked a bit like a young Christopher Walken with those cheekbones.

Frank Magree (left) and Oleg Dovsky from Run South, a short film showing at Flickerfest 2022.

“Are you American?” Magree asked.

“I’m from the Ukraine but I studied in Canada.”

Close enough.

Oleg Dovsky is a photographer living in Bali with his model girlfriend, and has done a bit of modelling and TV commercials himself. “I’d gone to grab a coffee,” Dovsky recalls of the chance meeting. “There was one free seat, next to a very questionable-looking fella wearing dirty clothes with mud in his hair. ‘Well, this is Bali’, I thought to myself.”

Run South, filmed on a budget in Indonesia.

In a matter of days, Dovsky would be chest-deep in filthy water on the nearby set built on farmland ($800 plus $100 to a local official), running from the Viet Cong (local shop workers and plasterers, paid $150 a day) before bleeding to death in a bamboo cage (built by Magree). He also found himself in an unscripted scene with an island pit viper. “I knew they were dangerous because I’d read those articles about ‘What might kill you when you travel to Bali’,” he says.

The resulting 29-minute film, Run South, showcased at the 2021 LA Shorts International Festival and will make its Australian premiere at Flickerfest on January 26. The Melbourne-based team of Magree (whose previous short, Sengatan, also shot in Indonesia, was nominated at Flickerfest in 2017 for Best Australian Short Film), co-director David Cleeve and co-producer/actor Paul Henri made it for $40,000 over three weeks. As you might imagine, that budget requires hustling and imagination in equal parts.

Chief among the hustlers was local man Made Budi Arsana, known as Marlin after his tattoo of a marlin fish.

“We met Marlin three trips earlier,” says Magree. “He was the guy that looks after Airbnbs and sorts everything out. We’d see him with two mobile phones going, always with something on the back of his bike.”

And so Marlin became the film’s fixer, scouting for props and sending Magree photos via highly agreeable WhatsApp messages. He scored a cage of lizards (“Okay Frank my friend, can pick up all”), replica AK-47s from a gun club (“How about this??” “Yes. Definitely”), ammunition boxes, scorpions and a snake (“Two million” Marlin wrote, sending a picture of a large, tightly coiled python. “Too much,” Magree wrote back. “Get cheaper”).

“At first they were scared,” Marlin says of the gun club members of being parted from their most precious toys, “but we pay them lots of money and then they happy. No money, no honey.”

Marlin helped dig the Viet Cong tunnels on set and recruited family members for a gambling scene in which Magree’s character Simon is pitted against a bare-knuckle boxer. That action had to be carefully choreographed by Australian kickboxing coach Dave Eagles because Magree broke some ribs running through jungle on the first day of filming.

When logistics allow, the team will put on a screening of Run South in Canggu for the locals, and throughout the pandemic they’ve given Marlin $300 a month, after he lost his job with the owner of local villas and had to sell his scooters. “Now I help my family with watermelon farming back at their village,” Marlin says.

Magree and producer Marc Gracie are pitching the script of a feature-length version to Sony and Universal in the US, although failing a good deal they’ll fund the rest themselves. They’re used to grifting, after all.

Run South premieres as Flickerfest as part of Best of Australian Shorts 7, on January 26.

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