From The Dry to My Name Is Gulpilil: the 10 best Australian films of 2021
Most – if not all – of us would like memories of 2021 erased from our minds post-haste so we can move on from a year which – just like the previous one – has been aptly and regularly described as a “shitshow”. But moving on, we would want to bring with us the films that helped us through, including several from our national cinema, which offered more than a few treats to break up the chaos and drudgery.
It was a particularly strong year for documentaries, with five making this list – three of them exploring artists who have had a profound impact on Australian culture. To qualify for this list, films needed to have had a release outside the festival circuit, either theatrically or on a streaming platform.
10. Streamline
The sports movie genre is filled with cheesy stories about triumphing on the field or in the pool, or even in the competitive world of paper plane throwing. Writer-director Tyson Wade Johnston initially seems to be steering Streamline in the rah-rah “must win at all costs!” direction of so many films before, emphasising that teenager Benjamin Lane (Levi Miller) could be a champion swimmer if he buckles down and gives it everything.
But the drama becomes something quite different when life, as they say, gets in the protagonist’s way, with major distractions including the release of his father (Jason Isaacs) from prison and the bad influence of a belligerent brother (Jake Ryan). This smart and gripping film is more interested in masculinity (toxic and otherwise) than laps of freestyle.
9. My First Summer
There are two beautiful things at the core of writer-director Katie Found’s feature debut: first, a pair of wonderful performances from Markella Kavenagh and Maiah Stewardson, playing teenagers who profoundly connect during a formative period in their lives; and, second, a lovely and tactile visual style that covers them like a warm blanket.
Simple moments (such as one of the girls resting her head against the chest of the other) resonate with complex feelings, and elements that might have felt heavy-handed (such as a ruminative voiceover reflecting on the death of one of the girls’ mothers) feel earned and unpretentious. Found evokes a bittersweet feeling: that precious things can’t last, though they can be remembered always.
8. The Witch of Kings Cross
Sonia Bible’s trippy documentary about artist and self-professed witch Rosaleen Norton is aesthetically audacious, and the so-called “witch of Kings Cross” surely wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Bible’s film uses all sorts of techniques to illustrate Norton’s life, joining a collection of documentaries that not only investigate Australian artists but channel the look and feel of their work – among them Ecco Homo, Whiteley and Women He’s Undressed.
I loved the film’s educationally hallucinogenic vibes: an Australian history lesson thrown into a cauldron. It is a vivid picture of a colourful individual and an ode to the joys of bohemian life, particularly life in the city, where the setting of the sun marks the beginning of a new night rather than the end of a day.
7. Strong Female Lead
The style of British documentarian Asif Kapadia, who assembles his films mostly using pre-existing materials, has been channelled in two electrifying Australian productions: the 2019 Adam Goodes doco The Final Quarter and now Tosca Looby’s account of the sexism and misogyny experienced by Julia Gillard during her time as Australia’s first female prime minister.
Strong Female Lead, which belongs to SBS’s Australian Uncovered suite of feature-length documentaries, is shudder and wince-inducing – a catalogue of national shame. It’s important, visceral viewing.
6. June Again
Suffering from debilitating dementia, June (a terrific Noni Hazlehurst) suddenly snaps out of it and comes good but is told by her doctors that her newfound lucidity won’t last long. So she does a Randle McMurphy and escapes a nursing home to reconnect with her family. It sounds like the stuff of sentimental mush, but instead June discovers a surreal world outside her known reality in which things have changed for the worse, including through family fallouts – a concept not dissimilar to the classic Australian film Bliss and Peter Carey’s novel on which it was based.
Writer-director JJ Winlove juggles dramatic and funny elements, crafting a film about inevitability in numerous forms: the limitations of body and mind, for starters, and also other things we cannot change – such as the nature of relationships between other people.
5. The Dry
Jane Harper’s page-turning book about a detective investigating a potential murder in a small arid town is an engaging read, but a bit of an airport novel, with a clear genre formula and boilerplate elements. Director Robert Connolly’s sparsely handsome adaptation is an example of a film that’s classier than its source material. Harper’s timeline shifts prove perfect for flashbacks detailing events long ago, when the aforementioned detective (a morose Eric Bana) lived in the town he reluctantly returns to.
There are two core mysteries: one involving the distant past when the protagonist may or may not have committed some kind of crime, and the other the present, when there may or may not have been a murder. Sounds vague, but the scripting and direction is pinpoint precise and given atmospheric intensity with a wide-lensed, tinder-dry look.
4. Firestarter: The Story of Bangarra
The amazing performers of the Bangarra Dance Theatre take us to places that transcend words. It’s fitting that Wayne Blair and Nel Minchin’s documentary about the group’s history and formation – including the story of artistic director Stephen Page and his family – is crafted with a sense of motion and movement, almost as if it too is dancing. Understanding that this is a story hooked to many things – including art, expression and of course Indigenous culture, both ancient and modern – they create a beguiling kind of history lesson.
3. Burning
The Australian government’s abominable handling of the climate crisis is an emotive issue for many of us who have watched in horror as our elected leaders not only fail to act but pour gasoline on the fire. Eva Orner’s gooseflesh-raising documentary, centred around the catastrophic black summer bushfire season of 2019-20, approaches a difficult subject with courage and clarity, spotlighting the contemptible failures of the Morrison government and more generally a world that cannot sustain its devotion to fossil fuel.
Many important talking points are canvassed briskly but densely, including the role of the media in fuelling climate denialism, and the differences (in frequency and severity) between bushfires as they used to be and as they are now in a so-called “new normal”. Burning is one of the most important Australian documentaries of the 21st century.
2. Nitram
About the time that Justin Kurzel’s hauntingly poetic drama about the life
Martin Bryant was released, I bingewatched a tonne of films focused on mass shootings – a frankly awful way to spend one’s time, full of the kinds of things Kurzel and screenwriter Shaun Grant (who worked together on Snowtown and True History of the Kelly Gang) assiduously avoid. Their film has no gratuity, no sensationalism, no simple definitions of mental illness, no crude messages about the banality of evil.
Every scene in Nitram navigates a minefield of ethical issues; they know every moment will be scrutinised for its implications. It’s challenging but made brilliantly and boldly, with an important message at its core about gun control – an issue that should not be allowed to disappear from the national conversation.
1. My Name Is Gulpilil
The great actor David Gulpilil died late last month after a lengthy bout of sickness following a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer. Molly Reynolds’ amazing documentary plays like a kind of living wake, with one Buñuelian image that has clung to my mind like glue: of Gulpilil lying in a coffin, covered in strips of film, which flow out of it as if they were a natural part of the man himself – or a natural part of the environment from which he emerged.
After Gulpilil’s death, many writers (including myself) attempted to articulate with words the magic of Gulpilil’s screen charism – an impossible task. Reynolds recognised that a straight recollection of the actor’s life would have been a disservice to his enigmatic talent, instead crafting a beautifully unconventional film that moves in fluid rhythms, edited as if its cuts and segues were coils of memories.