Eye of the Storm and The Hunter have been nominated in multiple categories, including best film, for the 2011 Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Awards (AACTA).

Eye of the Storm

120 min M15+ Friday 20 January – 8.30pm

Judy Morris has translated Patrick White’s droll and penetrating prose perfectly to the screen in this adaptation of The Eye of the Storm. The film opens in a grand old mansion in Sydney’s eastern suburbs in 1973, where wealthy matriarch Elizabeth Hunter (Charlotte Rampling) is dying. Her two adult children, Basil (Geoffrey Rush) and Dorothy (Judy Davis), have reluctantly returned from their respective expatriate locations to be at her side. Although middle-aged, they are still as children, trapped in the emotional web spun by their selfish and manipulative mother.

Long-suppressed but still raw family tensions are re-inflamed and complicated by the around-the-clock presence of Elizabeth’s nurses and her housekeeper (Helen Morse). Valiant family solicitor (John Gaden) is a placatory influence.

Fred Schepisi directs with supreme assurance, turning out an elegant, enjoyably florid last word in dysfunctional family dynamics, and there’s no questioning the across-the-board quality of the film’s rich array of nuanced performances, especially from the three leads.

Face to Face

120min M15+ Saturday 21 January – 3.00pm

Based on a play written by David Williamson and adapted by director Michael Rymer, Face to Face is an intense drama, in the vein of the classic Twelve Angry Men, but following the progress of a dispute-resolution session instead of a courtroom drama. Flashbacks are used to reveal the actions that have brought the characters together.

What appears simple at the start – an angry young man lashing out against his boss for firing him – grows in complexity and intensity as the characters reveal motives and grudges, weaknesses and ambitions that have been festering beneath the surface. As new revelations emerge, the audience is forced to shift their moral alignment.

The screenplay is funny, moving and brilliantly structured. It shines a light on contemporary Australian society and attitudes. The strong ensemble cast includes Vince Colosimo, Sigrid Thornton, Matthew Newton and Luke Ford (Black Balloon, Red Dog), whose raw performance as the central character is perfectly pitched. A powerful, engaging film delivering insight and emotional punch.

The Hunter

100min M Saturday 21 January – 8.00pm

Martin (Willem Dafoe), an industrial mercenary, is sent from Europe by a biotech company to track down the last Tasmanian tiger, wanted for its DNA. In Tasmania local veteran Jack (Sam Neill), arranges for Martin to be based at a remote house with the despondent wife (Frances O’Connor) and spirited children of a missing zoologist.

While Martin lays traps in the Tasmanian wilderness and waits, he builds a friendship with the family, who are watched over constantly, in a possessive way, by Jack. In time, the prevailing environmental conflict (greens versus loggers) and his developing connection to the family and the wilderness, force Martin to confront the reality of his work and personal morality, with dramatic consequences.

Based on an award- winning novel by Julia Leigh, The Hunter has been skillfully crafted by director Daniel Nettheim. Exquisite wilderness scenery and a nuanced soundtrack help to create a dense and compelling claustrophobic atmosphere in this tense eco-thriller.

International drama and documentary filmmaker, Robyn Hofmeyr has combined with Sunshine Coast hinterland Gubi Gubi elder, Bev Hand to produce an intriguing look beneath the surface of Bev’s ancestral land.

Robyn, who directed the confronting Women and War documentary, has employed her directorial skills on this portrait of a hinterland unknown to most white residents.

Here, Robyn describes the making of Walk Talking Country.

BEVERLY asked me if I would assist her to make a film. It was also a personal initiative of mine – I had been out with Bev before and I thought I would love to help her promote her cultural tours.

Beverley Hand performing at the Bunya Dreaming Festival

In the 26 minute film “Walk, talking Country” Beverly Hand, a Kabi Kabi woman, guides us through the Maleny Hinterland, pointing out the significance of local flora and educating us about the Indigenous knowledge of the region.

Beverly pays particular reference to the social, historical, environmental and cultural significance of the Bunya trees that are now scattered around the Blackall ranges. When the Bunya trees were heavy with nuts, Indigenous people would travel certain pathways across the land to the Blackall Ranges where the biggest Bunya trees were located. Beverly recreates the Bunya Festivals in a contemporary way every January to keep this ancient gathering alive. People come from far and wide to the Boroon Pocket dam to celebrate with her.

In the film we follow her along ancient and modern pathways across the Blackall Ranges, through old forests, to the now submerged sites of the Bunya Gatherings that were held at the Baroon Pocket area for centuries. Beverly points out plants and describes some of the ways her ancestors would use them. We see and learn how healthy landscapes

made healthy people and that contained within the landscape are all the natural resources necessary for a healthy life – medicine, fire making, shelter, fibre, nutrition etc.

“Walk talking Country” is a film about aboriginal tradition, culture and the environment. It is also a visual journey through a spectacular landscape.

Making the film has been a real challenge. It is a big story – Beverly Hand is a great storyteller, she is one of the conveyors of the oral traditions and legends of the Maleny Hinterland and Coastal areas. The challenge has been to tell her story in 26 minutes and to capture the beauty and highlight the diversity of this wonderful landscape as well as making sure the film has a strong narrative structure. I have been hampered by a shoestring budget, the weather and our work commitments but with the support of Beverly, my editor, good friends and family I have managed to produce a film that I hope gives viewers an insight into some of the Indigenous knowledge of the region.

Beverley Hand (left) and Aunty Gambril at the Bunya Dreaming Festival.

Actor, Director, Scriptwriter … Judy Morris

… is Outspoken with writer, Steven Lang

WE ALL KNOW writers have a hard time of it. Their business is words and let’s face it, they’re not shy of using them to let us know how difficult it is being them. But what about scriptwriters? Not only do they have to come up with an idea and put flesh on its bones, they then have to sell it to producers, directors, backers, cinema chains, all of whom, should they even choose to take it on, want to tweek the original. And then, just supposing their script gets through all that, they have to deal with actors.

Someone who knows a fair bit about the process is Judy Morris. She started off as a child star in both Australia and America. She later returned here to star in such films and television programs as Alvin Purple, Bellbird and Mother and Son. After appearing in fifty-four different shows she took up script writing. Working with George Miller and others she wrote Babe: Pig in the City and Happy Feet, the Oscar-winning animated film.

Her most recent project has been the script for Fred Schepisi’s adaptation of Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm. Judy will be Maleny Film Society and Outspoken’s special guest at this year’s Australian Film Festival. The two organisations have teamed up to bring her to Maleny for a conversation about writing in general and the Eye of the Storm in particular.

‘The thing about Patrick White,’ Judy says, ‘Is I think he is incredibly funny. He’s extraordinarily witty, but then he turns on a dime so you’re suddenly in very serious territory. He catapults you between the two all the time. It’s what I love about him, that you don’t know whether you’re going to be laughing at something … or crying about it, he’s so multi- faceted.’

Judy Morris, in conversation with local author Steven Lang, an Outspoken event presented in association with Maleny Film Society’s Australian Film Festival, Friday 20th January. Doors open 6.00 pm. $18 or $13 for members. Maleny Bookshop 5494 3666. Passes for the whole Festival are also available.

Above: Judy Morris stars in the 1986 movie, “The More Things Change” and the writer of “Happy Feet”.

Textile artist, Christine Elcoate boils up weeds for the film Weeds, Wonderful Weeds by Jill Morris. Christine has also written and produced a film called 'Code Red: Madeira' for the weeds film series to be screened during Weedbuster Week (6-9 September)

MEMBERS of the Maleny Film Co-op have switiched on their cameras to the subject of weeds. Assisted by small grants from the Sunshine Coast Council, Co-op members, Jill Morris, Leanne Farmiloe, Jess Begun and Christine Elcoate are producing a series of short films about the hinterland’s most invasive weeds.

Children’s book author, Jill Morris, is leading the group and hoping to have the four films ready for screening during Weedbuster Week (5-11 September) at the Maleny Library.

The four films are quite different: Leanne’s is an animation about the cane toad and Scotch Thistle, appealing to politicians Julia Gillard, Peter Garrett & Kevin Rudd for changed status: Jess’s is a philosophical debate emerging out of interviews with ecologists Ed Surman and Wayne Webb (with animation). Christine’s is a comedy about a gang of local women hunting for one leaf of the dreaded Madeira Vine. Jill Morris is producing a catalogue of the beauty and virtues of seven local weeds, told through poetry, art and music.

A film frame from Leanne Farmiloe’s animated film, Weeded Out.

Jill says that weed-like, other creative events are popping up for Weedbuster Week.

Ken Munsie is running an allied COMA exhibition in the library 29 August – 10 September: Maleny Images 9: Introduced.

During Weedbuster Week, Council is sending three teams, each comprising one film-maker and one artsworker, around ten Sunshine Coast libraries to screen the films and run workshops in Weaving with Weeds (Judy Wolski), Dyeing with Weeds (Christine Elcoate) and Painting & Drawing on Fabric with Weeds (Heather Gall).

Finally, during the whole month of September, a Weed Monster sculpture will be growing in the new $3m Arts & Ecology Centre in Maroochy Bushland Botanical Gardens, with workshops on 3, 10, 21 & 28 September. On Saturday 10 September there will be four workshops in the centre, two on Weaving with Weeds and two on Dyeing with Weeds, followed at 4.30pm by Films in the Forest, a screening of the four Maleny Film Co-op films.

The Weed Monster will grow out of the Centre workshops, with contributions created at the library workshops.

Divided into the four seasons, the year depicted in the title includes a birth, a funeral and expectations of a wedding, but the title itself makes no promise of excitement. Pope’s images of the changing weather are among the films pleasures, along with Yershon’s elegant score for string quintet, which complements Leigh’s use of lingering close-ups.

Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen play happily married Tom and Gerri, who lead industrious lives at work and at home. He’s an engineering geologist, and she’s a medical counsellor, and their 30-year-old son, Joe (Oliver Maltman), is a community lawyer. They tend their piece of vegetable garden at the local allotments, read and worry about the environment, and cook dinners for friends and family.

These include Mary, a secretary at Gerri’s clinic, who drinks too much, talks too much and usually overstays her welcome. Lesley Manville brings this sad and rather desperate character to life in a performance that will garner considerable acclaim. She pitches Mary’s voice to match her degree of giddiness, anxiety and need, and shows a mastery of facial expression that conveys her gradual awareness that she has allowed life to pass her by.

Another friend, Ken (Peter Wight), overweight, drunken and divorced, is in a similar plight and while Gerri and Tom show concern and tolerance, they have little to offer either of them much by way of concrete help.

Other Leigh veterans including Imelda Staunton and Phil Davis show up in small roles and, like the wonderful stage actor David Bradley as Tom’s bereaved brother, they are gifted in using silence and nuanced tones to deliver Leigh’s cryptic lines.

The most upbeat strand of the film concerns Joe(Oliver Maltman), Gerri and Tom’s son, who begins a relationship with the happy-go-lucky Katie (Karina Fernandez). In a film dealing so heavily in disappointment and bereavement, they at least find love and companionship.

Suburban settings like these are often used for sitcoms. At moments, Gerri and Tom could almost be mistaken for older versions of Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal in The Good Life.

Of course, such cosy comedy is anathema to Leigh, who probes far more deeply and uncomfortably into his characters’ lives than a TV sitcom ever would. Gerri and Tom can seem just a little bit too well-adjusted and even complacent. How, you wonder, have they avoided all the angst that dogs the other characters here? However, they are the fixed points in a world that otherwise seems very cruel and arbitrary indeed.

The baby boomer generation will no doubt see many familiar images in this film, and while it may have its ‘down’ moments, it is a film that reaffirms the richness of a long- lasting married life, particularly as old age approaches.

Still Waters is in the tradition of films like Amityville and centers around a country property that has been touched by evil. Stylistically, the film’s writer director Tana Smith says it is an ʻold schoolʼ horror with a feel similar to the original Halloween.

Tana says Still Waters relies on good old fashioned scares and practical effects shot on location rather than digital special effects that dominate most contemporary horror films.

The story revolves around Ben and his wife Sally who are taking time out from city life to spend a few months in the country to unwind. They have found the perfect place a quiet, remote, handmade house.

Unknown to the couple something watches them. Lurking in the shadows. Waiting. Trapped like beast it is hungry to be set free!

Tana Smith wrote a special part in the film for Meisha Lowe (pictured below), who he first met on a music video shoot.

“On the Still Waters set she delivered a performance that is one of my favorite parts of the film,” said Tana.

Still Waters is being prepared for festival screenings and it will be seen at Cannes in May during the ʻMarche du Filmʼ.

Festival director Malcolm Blaylock has selected 75 Australian and indigenous films including Deborah Mailman’s Ralph, (above), Robin Hoffmeyr’s The Ration Shed, Fish Lips and Bad Language.

The sell-out Family Sessions from last year are back! Three sessions of animation and shorts certain keep the young and young at heart enthralled and delighted.

This year Heart of Gold has specific sessions focusing on films from India in Beyond Bollywood. This series of films selected at Interfilm Berlin are grandiose, gorgeously colourful and greatly emotional.

Minnie Loves Junior, selected for the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival will screen on the Heart of Gold’s Opening Night on 17th March. “It clearly fits with spirit of our festival. It is a tender and beautiful film that touches the heart.”

This is a film festival not to be missed with 90 Australian premieres and 15 world premieres. For more information: www.heartofgold.com.au

This year the Maleny Film Festival celebrates its 21st birthday and first up is the society’s annual Australian Film Festival on Friday 21 and Saturday 22 January 2011.

Screenings begin on Friday 21 January at 7.15pm with The Ration Shed. This is local film-maker Robyn Hofmeyr’s vision of the transformation of the early buildings at Cherbourg Mission, in particular the old ration shed which is now a museum of Cherbourg history. Robyn and residents of Cherbourg will be present at the screening.

Also on Friday 21: The Tree, an Australian/French production which was filmed in Boonah – a mystic story about a young girl talking to her deceased father through a giant tree.

On Saturday 22 January at a 2.30pm matinee, audiences can enjoy South Solitary, a recent release by award- winning writer/director Shirley Barrett. Starring Miranda and Barry Otto, South Solitary is set in the 1920s, in the Solitary islands off the New South Wales coast, where Barry Otto’s character is the head lighthouse-keeper.

Saturday evening’s film is Love Serenade, a comedy drama following the antics of two lonely sisters chasing the newly arrived, thrice divorced radio DJ in a backwater town on the River Murray.

In 1996 Love Serenade won the Camera d’Or at Cannes and has been re-mastered as an iconic Australian film. This print is provided by courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia’s Deluxe/Kodak Collection.

Between the matinee and the evening program, local author Steven Lang will interview Australian film writer and director Shirley Barrett, in a collaboration between the film society and the Outspoken Festival (4.45-5.45pm).

At 6pm on both Friday and Saturday evenings, dinner will be available, catered by Pomodoras on Obi; also drinks from the bar, tea, coffee and slices.

Full festival passes are $35 ($20 for MFS members); individual sessions: $13 ($8 for members).

For further information phone Ken Munsie on 5494 2882 or check www.malenyfilmsociety.info

Maleny Film Society and Outspoken have joined together in January to bring writer/director Shirley Barrett to town.

AS PART of the Australian Film Festival MFS will be showing South Solitary and Love Serenade. Between the screenings Shirley will talk with Steven Lang about, amongst other things, the business of writing for film, what it means to collaborate, what gets lost and what is gained through the process.

Shirley’s film career began in 1988 with an award-winning short film, Cherith. On the basis of its success she moved into television, directing episodes of

Heartbreak High, Boys From the Bush and A Country Practice before writing and directing Love Serenade. Released in 1996, the film won the Camera d’Or at Cannes, and gave her the opportunity to concentrate on her own work.

She has made two more films since then, Walk the Talk and, this year, South Solitary, which was awarded the 2010 Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Best Film Script. She has somehow found the time, meanwhile to direct several episodes in the much lauded series Love My Way. Shirley is an accomplished speaker, and delightfully honest about her work.

Saturday January 22 from 2.30 pm. Bookings through Maleny Film Society Ph: 5494 2882.

In February Outspoken will present the author John Birmingham. John is an author who almost defies categorisation. His first novel He Died With a Falafel in His Hand brought him early success. He followed up with The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco, but then took a dive into serious history, producing Leviathan, The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney, which won Australia’s

National Prize for non-fiction in 2002. He has since written two Quarterly Essays: Appeasing Jakarta and A Time for War as well as been a regular contributor of in- depth journalism for The Monthly. In the last year he has contributed pieces on, amongst other subjects, Julian Assange, NSW (as a failed state) and a review of Sebastian Junger’s War. In the meantime he decided to try his hand at writing genre fiction, producing the Axis of Time trilogy, and more recently the first two books in a new series, Without Warning and, in 2010, After America. All five of these books have been bestsellers world-wide.

John will engage in conversation with Steven Lang about his many different approaches to writing. Wednesday February 23 at 6 pm. Maleny Community Centre. Bookings essential, Maleny Bookshop.

Ph: 5494 3666. For more information on events please visit www.outspokenmaleny.com

FOOD INC – (US) PG – Documentary – 94 mins

Must-see documentary for anyone who eats … The current method of raw food production is largely a response to the growth of the fast food industry since the 1950s. The production of food overall has more drastically changed since that time than the several thousand years prior. Controlled primarily by a handful of multinational corporations, the global food production business has production of large quantities of food at low direct inputs (most often subsidised) resulting in enormous profits, which in turn results in greater control of the global supply of food sources within these few companies. Health & safety are often overlooked by the companies, & are often overlooked by government in an effort to provide cheap food regardless of these negative consequences. Many changes are based on advancements in science &
technology, but often have negative side effects. The answer the companies have come up with is to throw more science at the problems to bandage issues but not the causes. The global food supply may be in crisis with lack of biodiversity, but can be changed on the demand side of the equation.

Q&A session with a panel chaired by Julie Shelton from SlowFood Sunshine Coast will follow the movie.

Saturday September 25

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO – (Sweden) MA15+ Crime/Thriller– 152 mins

After a provincial fair in Sweden, 16-year old Harriet Vanger (Ewa Froling) disappears without a trace on September 29 1966. Nearly forty years later, investigative journalist Mikael Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist), is contacted by her uncle, Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), who wants him to try & find out what happened to Harriet. But even as Blomqvist searches for clues into the mystery, a young hacker, Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) is secretly searching through his own life – even hacking into his laptop & following his search. The wealthy Vanger family becomes the subject of Blomqvist’s probing & extraordinary secrets lead him & Lisbeth on a dangerous & surprising journey.

Maleny Community Centre
Maple Street, Maleny
6.00pm Dinner by Pomodoras
7.15pm Film commences
Enquiries: 5494 2882
www.malenyfilmsociety.info