Midnight Oil: The Hardest Line feature documentary to premiere at Sydney Film Festival
The knotty, defiant story of Sydney rock band Midnight Oil is set to be told as a feature-length documentary film, with the world premiere to take place at the Sydney Film Festival on June 5.
The knotty, defiant story of Sydney rock band Midnight Oil is set to be told as a feature-length documentary film, with the world premiere to be held at the Sydney Film Festival on June 5.
Titled Midnight Oil: The Hardest Line – a lyric from one of their biggest hits, Power and the Passion – it has been a project seven years in the making, and the filmmakers have a rich, 46-year musical history on which to draw, with much of the band’s public efforts focused on social justice and progressive causes.
“Normal filmmaking decisions and narratives were not going to work with Midnight Oil,” writer and director Paul Clarke told The Australian on Tuesday.
“It took quite a long time to work out how to unlock it. We hit on the idea of the ‘hardest line’.
“Most of us compromise in our lives or careers; what happens if you always take the hardest line?
“That cracked the nut of the story.”
Its narrative will include new interviews and unseen footage, as well as the inside story on signature Midnight Oil news-making moments such as the Exxon protest gig in New York in 1990 and the controversial appearance at the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000, when the five band members wore black overalls that prominently displayed the word “sorry”, as a nod to the national apology they believed was owed to Indigenous Australians.
In a statement issued on Wednesday, drummer and songwriter Rob Hirst said: “With strong management, a tough crew and a sabre-tooth lawyer, bands can often dwell in a kind of mobile Faraday cage – the lightning striking all around, while the musicians remain high and dry in a studio, on a stage or wedged inside a Tarago.”
“Thus it was for Midnight Oil: rarely were we able to focus on the horizon and see the ‘big picture’, if there was such a thing,” Hirst said. “So a film such as The Hardest Line is as much a revelation as a chronicle. Perhaps at last we can frame the last 50 years, make some collective sense of it, wrap it in a box marked ‘the luckiest band ever’.”
The film will cover Midnight Oil’s reunion for a world tour in 2017 – which was attended by about 500,000 people in 16 countries – as well as footage from their final run of shows in 2022 following the release of their 13th album, Resist.
Still, given the Oils’ long career, it is impossible to cover every aspect of the band in a film whose duration approaches two hours.
“It was like trying to push a doona into a Scotch bottle,” said Clarke with a laugh. “It was both an honour and a burden to be given the task.”
Clarke is a veteran producer of Australian entertainment whose most recent film project was working as executive producer on award-winning documentary John Farnham: Finding the Voice, which broke box office records on release last year.
Produced by Clarke’s company, Blink TV, and Beyond Entertainment, its principal funding was supplied by Screen Australian and the ABC in association with Screen NSW.
In a statement, Sydney Film Festival director Nashen Moodley said: “This documentary not only chronicles the formidable journey of one of Australia’s most influential bands but also captures the spirit of an era that reshaped our cultural and political landscapes.
“It’s a fitting tribute to their legacy and a profound reflection on their impact that continues to inspire audiences around the world.”
The band’s record label and publisher, Sony Music, provided financial support, and after the June 5 premiere at Sydney’s State Theatre, the documentary’s theatrical distribution will be handled by Roadshow Films.
More Coverage
