We go behind the scenes with web series Footballer Wants a Wife, which wrapped filming in Toorak, Melbourne last week. It’s a spoof reality show that follows three professional sportsman on their journey to love.
Created by Ben Nicholas, Footballer Wants a Wife is directed by Jo O’Shaughnessy and produced by Julian V Costanzo and Jonathon Dutton. The series was written by Ben Nicholas and Carl J. Sorheim.
Like the show’s Facebook page to keep up to date.
The funniest wine show in town is back with a second season of vineyard misadventures.
The Chaser’s Chris Taylor, writer Joshua Tyler and creator Nathan Earl are back for another fictional attempt at making their ill-fated wine show Plonk. Season 2 of the satirical mockumentary takes you behind the scenes as ‘host’ Chris, ‘producer’ Nathan and ‘researcher’ Josh visit wineries in the picturesque South Australian wine regions of Barossa, McLaren Vale, Clare Valley, Coonawarra and the Adelaide Hills.
This time there are cameos from sommelier Matt Skinner, South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill and local foodie legend Maggie Beer, as well as some of the top Australian winemakers from the region.
Take a look at photos from behind the scenes and follow the trail as the boys visit no less than 38 wineries in 6 episodes.
Season 2 is scheduled for release on Thursday 18 June on Stan, and if you haven’t already you can check out Season 1 now.
There’s no slowing down the Aussie contingent in Hollywood lately. From director James Wan’s two new features, Chris Hemsworth’s latest gig and the juggernaut that is Mad Max: Fury Road, it’s a huge year for Australians globally.
After the gargantuan Furious Seven, one of the most successful films of all time*, Aussie director James Wan announced last week that his next two features will be Warner Brothers’ Aquaman, and Sony’s Robotech.
Actor Chris Hemsworth joins the cast of Paul Feig’s highly anticipated Ghostbusters reboot** which is famously flipping gender roles. Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon take over the lead ghost-hunting roles previously played by Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson, while Hemsworth will play the paranormal sleuths’ receptionist previously played by Annie Potts.
Meanwhile George Miller’s Mad Max reboot is now the third-highest grossing Australian film at the global box office. Mad Max: Fury Road has taken US$334 million worldwide as of early June putting it in third place behind Happy Feet ($384m), The Great Gatsby ($351m) and Crocodile Dundee ($328m).***
And while Mad Max was dominating the box office around the world, its runner up and in a close second place was Pitch Perfect 2, starring Australian comedienne Rebel Wilson. ***
* Source: Time
** Source: Hollywood Reporter
*** Source: Box Office Mojo
**** Source: Deadline
We caught up with Judith to talk about what inspired her to a do an in-depth look at present-day gender roles and feminism, and the complexities of making a show like Judith Lucy is All Woman.
Screen Australia: What inspired you to do Judith Lucy is All Woman?
Judith Lucy: It was inspired by a conversation I had with Kaz Cooke. We were having a chat about feminism, the 80s and stomping around in our Doc Martens – and I think that conversation had been inspired by pole dancing, and the fact that it has become a form of exercise, which I never saw coming – and Kaz said, ‘in the 80s, I really thought feminism was going to have this linear narrative and that things were going to keep getting better and better for women’. And we had to agree that that really hasn’t happened. That was the seed of it.
Making Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey I combined comedy and documentary – and hopefully I didn’t do a terrible job – and I thought that kind of format would lend itself to looking at where women in Australia are today. I was still filming Spiritual Journey when that occurred to me.
SA: What surprised you the most about the modern Australian woman while you were doing the show?
JL: The most pleasant surprises I got were people, not just women but men I spoke to as well, who were going against gender stereotypes. The people who were not doing the expected.
I was surprised by Corrie the stay-at-home mum of five. (Having looked after just three of her children for two hours, my God, I have so much respect for women who make that decision). And when I asked her if she was a feminist, I wasn’t expecting her to say yes.
I was equally inspired by the stay-at-home dads who’d made that choice too, despite a lot of people they’d worked with thinking they were crazy.
It was fantastic to talk to Buck Angel.
All these people were challenging our notions of what being a man and what being a woman is. It surprised me greatly and in a very positive way because I think it’s people like that that will help us to change.
SA: What sort of reaction did the show get?
JL: I’m not on social media and I tend not to read reviews so as far as I’m concerned, everyone loved it. [But] I was particularly chuffed when younger women who’d watched it said that it made them have a think about what feminism means. And some dads dropped me some nice emails.
SA: What was the most challenging part of the show for you as the presenter?
JL: I had the same fear that I had with Spiritual Journey, which was getting the balance right: I really wanted the show to be funny and entertaining, but I also wanted it to look seriously at some of these issues. I was always hoping we’d get that balance right.
And obviously when you’re interviewing people that is a big responsibility. I didn’t want anyone to think that because I was a comedian I would take the piss out of them. There are people who are making themselves quite vulnerable to you, and you don’t ever want to take advantage of that.
I was anxious about doing the best job that I could, really.
SA: Do you think you’d ever revisit the subject matter? See how it’s tracking in a few years?
JL: Look, I’m sure there will still be an awful lot to explore when it comes to this issue. And it would be very interesting to see where we are five, 10 years from now. It’ll be interesting to see how far off we are from having another female prime minister, for example.
The thing with a lot of these issues too is that you have to keep checking on them. Kaz has always talked about this – we can’t ever forget the rights we now have are thanks to the women that have gone before us. And we can’t ever become complacent and thinking that we’ll always have those rights. It’s very important to keep looking at where we’re at.
Judith Lucy is All Woman is out now on DVD. And her stand-up, Ask No Questions of the Moth, is touring around Australia until early August.
By Imogen Corlette
In a remote part of the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia, a group of elderly women gather in the cool evening air. There’s an air of excitement, but their faces are solemn. It’s serious work that’s brought them back here to their country that they haven’t seen for many years. And it hasn’t been an easy journey to get here – some may never have the opportunity to visit again.
They’re here to perform their songline: Tjawa Tjawa as part of the Songlines on Screen film project. Theirs is a story about a group of women in search of husbands.
The songline charts a long journey that takes them from Roebourne, through Kiwirrkurra and Lake Mackay, all the way through Manga Manga, south of Balgo in the Great Sandy Desert.
The songline is part storytelling, part painting, and part dance. And, like all songlines, it’s a moving art – a map guiding travel from one place to the next.
Songlines are a unique art form and one that may soon start to disappear, as younger generations move away, and lose touch with these aural traditions. Traditionally, they’re held by a custodian, who performs the songline as they travel, bringing the land into being through song. The custodian also acts as a manager helping maintain the relationship with subsequent custodians.
The songlines concept doesn’t match with anything familiar in European thinking, which sees the material world as separate to the conceptual, temporal and imagined. To understand it, requires a letting go of this framework to allow for the possibility that all can exist simultaneously. Within this concept come the songlines.
Another songline – Desert Dingo – charts a part of the Dingo songline that travels from as far South as Port Augusta, through Uluru and Alice Springs, far into the Northern Territory and Queensland – even as far as Mornington Island. It travels a total of 450 kms from Ali Curung in the Northern Territory, to Undilla, just inside the Queensland border, and crosses Alywarre, Warlpiri , Kayteje and Anmetjere lands. The community of Ali Curung, where the story begins, takes its name from the Dingo Dreaming and literally means land or country of the dog. The story tells of a very significant site on the outskirts of Ali Curung, were six dingo pups split into pairs and headed off in different directions. One pair’s path lead to the caves at Wunara and then on to Undilla, from where other another language group assume custodianship of the songline until it reaches the Lardil People of Mornington Island.
Songlines are often made up of cycles – sections that relate to different aspects of a story and different sections of the route itself. Where the route takes you across the land of different clans, different custodians have charge of that section or cycle – literally singing you forward along the route, to the next where another custodian awaits with their own song. In this way the songline can connect a number of different clans under one law, and one ancestral homeland.
Bulunu Milkarri is a womens crying song about Bulunu, the south east cloud formations. Bulunu Milkarri is one part of the foundational songline that connects the Djambarrpuyŋu clan groups and their traditional Island estates off the north coast of Arnhem Land through the underlying currents of the Arafura Sea. It relates to the cycles of the seasons and the spiritual and emotional wellbeing of the Djambarrpuyŋu people.
The Bulunu Milkarri songline calls the rain to replenish the land and bring the time of abundance in bush food. The rain that Bulunu storm clouds bring also represents grief, tears and the ancestors returning in the form of rain, which heals the heart and brings abundance of spiritual and emotional wellbeing.
This women’s songline must be performed at Djambarrpuyŋu funerals to prepare the spirit of the deceased for its journey back to the ancestral homeland. Without it, the funeral process is incomplete. With very few women left who can perform this songline and uphold this responsibility for funeral ceremonies, this film strives to contribute to ensuring the future of this songline for generations to come.
These are just a few of many songlines that are being captured on film right now across the country. For the past four to five years, small film crews, mainly remote Indigenous media producers and broadcasters, have been capturing them, bit by bit. Many of them will never be seen by anyone outside the tribe or the bloodlines, to which they belong. Many of them are sacred and secret. But here and there are parts of the stories that can be shared openly. And some of these will soon be making their way to screens around Australia as part of Songlines on Screen – created by remote Indigenous filmmakers and songlines custodians across the country, with the help of Screen Australia.
Clearly Songlines on Screen is much more than a film project – it’s an entire layer of Indigenous heritage and life that once lost, will be gone forever. Captured on screen, its survival is assured for future generations.
Songlines on Screen premiered at the Sydney Film Festival on 9 June 2015 and will screening comprehensively on NITV from March 2016.
Tapsell’s speech was not a spontaneous outburst in the heat of the moment. It was a carefully considered call to arms, refined with colleagues and friends.
“I wanted to say something positive, not make anyone uncomfortable,’ says Tapsell. “I grew up in Kakadu where I was made to feel valued and beautiful. But as I fell in love with rom-coms like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones I felt like their message was that I didn’t deserve the kind of love they were about because I didn’t look like Cameron Diaz or Katherine Heigl. But those are the roles I want to be cast in.”
Screen Australia CEO Graeme Mason was at the Logies and remembers “It was a defining moment. Everyone embraced Miranda’s sentiments so warmly.”
Mason sees Screen Australia as having to be part of the solution.
“We are looking at what we should do as a major funding contributor to production. We are going to be having conversations with our key partners, like the ABC and SBS, but everyone has to get on board. We have to be both the carrot and the stick: we need broadcasters to see that they should be doing it and that it’s also smart to do it because it’s a reflection of who their audiences are.
“Today we can see that women in general are quite well represented now on our TV screens – but that took time. If you look at who is carrying the major shows, they are women like Asher Keddie and Claudia Karvan. TV is still streets ahead of film in terms of gender balance…. although Mad Max: Fury Road has given female film presence a huge boost. But there’s more to be done.
“Now we need to ask now: where is our broader cultural mix? Where are the faces of the subcontinent and Asia? Are our acting institutions taking in students from those communities?’
Casting agent Anousha Zarkesh has been at the forefront of sourcing Indigenous talent for landmark series like Redfern Now and sees its success, and the earlier popularity of The Sapphires as breaking the mould.
“Before that, you had Ernie Dingo as the first blackfella to become mainstream on Getaway, then Aaron Pederson in Wildside, and Deborah Mailman in The Secret Life of Us and Offspring but they were isolated cases.
“Every time I suggest actors for certain roles I always give directors a variety of ethnic/white choices so that we can discuss this openly and then present to the network. The ‘men in suits’ need to know that a show with non anglo actors as leads will rate. But I don’t believe in quotas as the industry is just too small. It has to happen out of goodwill but I do feel now that there is a willingness from producers and directors to think outside the ‘white’ box.
“I’ve just finished casting The Principal for Kriv Stenders (Red Dog), a drama series set in a boys school in Punchbowl. Ninety per cent of the cast were ethnic. Some roles were written as specifically Lebanese (which is important for the story) but others could be any nationality. Because they lived in Western Sydney, we decided to reflect the real society they lived in and cast Asian, Maori and Islander actors.’
Matchbox Pictures producer Tony Ayres (Maximum Choppage, The Family Law) has been a long time campaigner for diversity and holds passionate views on the subject.
“I feel strongly about this because it’s my background, whereas for others it’s an afterthought. As far as Indigenous visibility, there has been a concerted, conscious campaign by government agencies to develop talent and now we are seeing how the support has paid off. It has created a sustainable ecosystem of Indigenous production.
“I believe legislation is necessary to achieve the same thing now with ethnic diversity. It should be a condition of funding. I am in favour of quotas, as they have been used elsewhere without affecting the market’s appetite. Resistance to positive discrimination falls away when you see that it has no negative impact on viewing audiences.
“For a long time I’ve been a champion of colour-blind casting but it’s not always the answer. You have to be more pro-active than that in order to create a talent pool that gives actors the chance to develop their range, get lead roles and grow fan bases. We need to be training talent and fast tracking the stand out performers just as the Indigenous production programs did. Then we’ll get the same results.”
Watch Miranda Tapsell in ‘Love Child’, 8.40pm Tuesdays on Nine
‘The Principal’ screens on SBS later in 2015.
Screen Australia is committed to supporting outstanding Australian screen talent and content. We are Australia’s major screen funding agency and provide investment for the development and production of Australian film, television, documentary and interactive media, as well as resources for industry and business development.
© 2016 Screen Australia
