Taking their time in the sun

IF the films at the Message Sticks festival are any guide, long-term investment in indigenous filmmakers is beginning to pay off.

THERE'S a distinct buzz around the Message Sticks Indigenous Film Festival this year this year. Heading the event is Warwick Thornton's debut feature film, Samson and Delilah, which has been selected to show at the Cannes Film Festival next week.

The film has been widely lauded, notably by one of The Australian's film critics, David Stratton, who gave the love story five stars and called it "one of the finest films ever made in this country".

With a debut feature from indigenous director Richard Frankland, a documentary on Aboriginal activist Charles Perkins by award-winning director Ivan Sen, three international films and seven short films, including shorts by actresses Deborah Mailman and Leah Purcell, the line-up for the 10th Message Sticks is strong.

This year's festival is being seen as the fruition of the heavy investment over the past 10 years by the federal Government's film arm, Screen Australia, and public broadcasters, particularly the SBS, in indigenous filmmaking.

Thornton's career is a good example of the way that Screen Australia's steady, constant support of identified directorial talent has paid dividends. His career has been in development for 20 years, and he has directed numerous short films, including Greenbush, Mimi and Nana, which all form part of a retrospective of Thornton's work that will screen at Message Sticks this week.

"We've been nurturing these filmmakers and funding their films for over 10 years," says Sally Riley, manager of Screen Australia's indigenous branch.

"For us it's like we've finally got to this point where people really start to get recognised and they get out into the mainstream audience."

With a heavy focus on script development early on in the life of a film, and a commitment to identifying and banking on new talent, Screen Australia has fostered the careers of a host of indigenous directors, whose feature films are now about to hit the screens.

Rachel Perkins, co-curator of Message Sticks, has a big-budget feature, Bran Neu Dae, starring Geoffrey Rush, due to be released this year. Lower profile directors including Allan Collins, Wayne Blair, Beck Cole and Darlene Johnson are attracting increasing attention.

And with the Australian film industry still somewhat bogged down in a sense of collective insecurity - Baz Luhrmann's epic Australia was saddled with the impossible task of lifting the entire industry out of the doldrums, and fell short - it is inevitable that Samson and Delilah, and to a lesser extent, the indigenous film industry as a whole, is being saddled with the burden of leading an Australian cinematic revival.

Such hopes should be injected with "a healthy dose of reality", says Darren Dale, co-curator of Message Sticks.

"I think expectations can sometimes kill the appetite," Dale says. "It's probably an easy perspective to take to say 'Look - we've arrived!' I think really the Message Sticks festival is at a unique point now and a point of maturity. It's like the completion of the full cycle of this growth in the indigenous film sector.

"It's the culmination of concerted and targeted development of key filmmakers that have an important voice, that have something unique to say. And I think that intensive development period by Screen Australia and the former Australian Film Commission has really borne fruit.

"It hasn't been sort of open slather, a democratic approach that says, 'Let's support as many people as we can and hope we get some good ones.' It's actually identifying talented people and saying, 'We are going to invest in their careers."'

But the new crop of indigenous directors cannot be expected to carry the future of the Australian film industry on their shoulders, Dale says.

"I think we all are looking to build on

the enormous gains and the enormous successes and create more appetite in the audience. We've got to make sure we keep up the good work."

While emerging indigenous directors reap the gains of a level of government support that is unrivalled in the world, those with established careers are coming face-to-face with a kind of paradox that has been created by the success of indigenous filmmaking.

Sen, whose 2002 film Beneath Clouds won the first movie and new talent awards at the Berlin Film Festival - and was nominated for a Golden Bear - warns against the creep of artistic complacency that threatens to follow great success in the indigenous film industry.

Sen has stepped into an international arena with his latest film, Dreamland, still in production, which is about a dying UFO hunter who roams the desert landscape of Area 51 in the US.

"You only realise once you step out of that indigenous zone, that's when you find out a few things about how people in festivals define you as a filmmaker and how your work is perceived and how it's judged," Sen says.

"There's a certain amount of sentiment involved which you just can't get away from.

"It's not even conscious a lot of the time from people who buy films or from festivals. You begin to realise how festivals and distributors, they have a currency quota. And as an indigenous filmmaker you kind of slide into a certain area for them.

"At a big film festival, they'd be interested in me as an indigenous filmmaker making culturally specific content, whereas they would consider someone who's a big name director to do whatever the hell they want.

"And then you start to realise that the quality of what you are producing is actually not quite what you think it might be, because what they're judging is not quite the same thing that they are judging with the non-indigenous filmmakers.

"There's something among the content that is kind of its own drawcard. By stepping outside of that you actually realise that, and you start to step your game up a bit."

It is perhaps only through the subtlety of films such as Samson and Delilah, which weaves its love story alongside themes of petrol sniffing and town camp community life, issues that are usually tackled through the news media rather than narratively through film, that indigenous directors will transcend international demands for stereotypical filmmaking.

The restraint displayed in films such as Samson and Delilah also presents an intriguing contrast to the way black themes are tackled in mainstream cinema: for example, most recently in Luhrmann's Australia, which tailored its Stolen Generation themes to elicit maximum sympathy from non-indigenous audiences.

"With Warwick's film, I think there's a sense that the world he's created is so visceral and so palpable that that comes through," Dale says of Samson and Delilah.

"I think an audience will always respond to something I think that is honest and true. I think the reason that people are responding so much to the film is that it's a world that's not been explored in film before."

But there is no doubt that Thornton's depiction of that world will shock audiences, particularly internationally.

"I think people will be confronted; we don't portray this side of Australia," Dale says. "A lot of our marketing materials and the tourism from around Australia is indigenous art and vibrant dance and song and ceremony.

"That certainly exists and is out there, but apart from domestically made, documentary-style content,I don't think we've seen this on the big screen. So I think there'll be a sense of shock, probably, and horror.

"But that's the artistry of Warwick's filmmaking, that he's able to take you into a world that you haven't seen essentially still through characters and a love story."

The Message Sticks Indigenous Film Festival opens at the Sydney Opera House today.