The Best (And Most Underseen) Australian Films of 2014
Forget the kitchen-sink drama stereotype; 2014 was Australia’s year of genre films. Here's some you might have missed.
Charlie’s Country, dir. Rolf de Heer
Some astute critic somewhere said that this film completes a trilogy of Rolf de Heer films about Indigenous Australia; if Ten Canoes was about pre-history, The Tracker was about colonialism, and Charlie’s Country is about the present. It’s the only art film on this list, and it’s so real it could be a documentary. There are no sub-plots – there’s no need. David Gulpilil is Charlie, a man for whom the Intervention in the Northern Territory is making life impossible; he’s driven back to live in the old way, out bush. Though he finds some peace, he also finds health problems, hardship and loneliness, and is forced into an even more unyielding maze of whitefella rules in the city.
At one point, ejected from his land, sitting forlorn in a Darwin hospital beside a blackfella friend who will die there, he wails: “We need to go home”. It’s one of the defining sentiments of contemporary Australia – a frightened, homeless country of migrants, which fears other migrants, and continues to displace and disrespect its original inhabitants. I’m convinced that in ten, twenty, thirty years, we’ll look back on Charlie’s Country as an important moment in not just the history of Indigenous film, but in the cinema and politics of Australia.
View on: iTunes and DVD
Or try: The Last Wave (Peter Weir, 1977), The Darkside (Warwick Thornton, 2013), The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (Fred Schepisi, 1978), and Radiance (Rachel Perkins, 1998; available to stream via SBS On Demand)