A Film a Week - The Forbidden Aunt / Zabranjena tetka

 previously published on Cineuropa

Serbian-Australian actress Bojana Novaković is widely-known for her work in television, as well as in Australian and Hollywood films, and people also know a thing or two about her highly-publicised past romances. Now, for the first time, she is testing her capabilities as a filmmaker with a documentary film inspired by the relationships within her own extended family. One could expect a strictly personal project, maybe even a proper artist’s ego trip, but The Forbidden Aunt truly transcends, and turns out to be something quite universal. The feature has just premiered in the documentary competition of the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival.

The filmmaker’s starting point was an awkward situation she remembered from her childhood: her immediate family never let her spend too much time with one of her aunts, even though the woman had never harmed Bojana in any way and the filmmaker also remembers her as a fun person to be around. The reason for this attitude may have been aunt Gordana’s lifestyle, as she was what could be described as a bohemian. In an attempt to investigate the matter, Novaković goes back to Serbia in her hometown of Užice, where Gordana still lives, with the intention to make an easy-breezy documentary about her quirky aunt, who might be a bit foul-mouthed, but means no harm.

This is precisely what she appears like in the opening shot, where Gordana is giving her niece a lecture on the advantages of granny panties over g-strings. Also, she is the kind of person who is always happy to lend her neighbours a helping hand. Born the third daughter of a working-class family, she was never great at school, but she was a talented and inspired artist of a hairdresser who also loved to party in the company of men she easily fell for, and who did love a drink. Although her own children, Mladen and Marija, do not seem to hold any grudge against her, the truth is that their mother’s drinking was so excessive, and her behaviour so erratic, that they were basically left to fend for themselves as early as in their teenage years.

As soon as this is revealed, a breach is made which gradually opens, leading to a darker side of things, as the aforementioned destructive behaviour certainly had its reasons. Indeed, Gordana was an unwanted child, her “crime” being that she was a girl when her family expected a son. While her older sisters, Bojana’s mother Biljana and the family’s favourite, Mirjana, fared much better, Gordana was neglected. This childhood trauma caused by her parents later led, in adulthood, to her inflicting the same trauma to her own children, because hurt people hurt people.

The gesture of flipping one’s childhood memories upside down by digging into the darker side of one’s family’s past is not a particularly new one in documentary cinema – families always tend to harbour secrets and serve as battlefields for various conflicts between their members. The sincerity of the approach can help, but only so much. The thing with The Forbidden Aunt is that Bojana Novaković clearly sees a wider picture, but has enough discretion to refrain from using her family’s story as a metaphor of sorts for the Serbian and former Yugoslav society. Instead, she shows a lot of empathy for her aunt, possibly because she herself is no stranger to some of Gordana’s patterns of behaviour.

The special treat here is Novaković’s decision to listen to her aunt’s suggestion and insert a number of telenovela-style segments to re-enact moments of the family’s past, and to complement the rather scarce archive material and the newly filmed footage (of varying quality), shot by the filmmaker herself under varying conditions, which form the rest of the movie. The soap opera scenes, where Novaković plays both herself and Gordana alongside both professional actors and non-actors, serve the film quite well, due to Dušan Grubin’s lensing and Milica Kolarić’s inspired costumes. Thanks to these segments, The Forbidden Aunt feel a bit less like a necessary, but still very bitter pill to swallow.

A Film a Week - The Furnace

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

John Huston’s classic “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948) echoes through Roderick MacKay’s feature debut “The Furnace” which premiered at last year’s Venice section Orizzonti, before heading on a festival tour with the final stop at Karlovy Vary, where we caught it. Both films are the stories of gold and greed, but the key difference between them are their milieus and the differences between the American and the Australian use of western genre tropes.

In America, westerns were created to preserve the myth of the hardy pioneers that fought the savage Natives for the land and have pushed the frontiers of the so-called civilised world from one ocean to another. Only in the New Hollywood era, the revisionist westerns appeared aimed at debunking the myths and used as the metaphorical canvas to expose the American imperial politics of the 20^th century. In Australia, however, the western setting is connected with colonialism which echoes to the nowadays. The social landscape in Australian westerns tends to be more complicated culture- and class-wise and the contemporary Australian westerns are used as a tool for dealing with the dark past.

What makes “The Furnace” different from the likes of “Sweet Country” (Warwick Thornton, 2017), “The Nightingale” (Jennifer Kent, 2018) and “High Ground” (Stephen Johnson, 2020), and what makes it Asian enough for Asian Movie Pulse is its unique milieu based on a footnote from the country’s colonial history. In the late 19^th century, the British Empire “imported” a number of camel drivers from India, Afghanistan and Persia to help move the freight through the vast desert landscape in the middle of the continent. Technically free people, those unwilling immigrants were by no means equal to the white settlers.

Our protagonist is the Afghan cameleer named Hanif (the Egyptian actor Ahmed Malek) who has quit his job in the imperial freight company to start his own with his mentor, the Sikh Jundah (Kaushik Das) and their Aboriginal tracker friend Woorak (Baykali Ganambarr of “The Nightingale” fame). They want to leave Western Australia for the parts on the North where there are more job opportunities, but firstly they want to attend a tribal ceremony at Woorak’s village. Out of the blue, the clash with a white prospector ensues, and it leaves Jundah dead, the rest displaced, and Hanif alone and jobless.

Soon enough, he encounters another man who has lost his buddies due to a violent encounter. Mal (David Wenham) is a rough old bush bandit who is the only survivor of the mine robbery. He is wounded and in the need of help, but he carries some gold bars on him. The two men team up despite Mal’s racist attitudes, and their goal is to reach the Chinese clan-operated furnace near the town of Kalgoorie where they can melt and split the gold before they part their ways and Hanif goes back home to Afghanistan. However, the members of the Army’s gold squad are on their trail, lead by the ruthless Sergeant Shaw (Jay Ryan) who is more than a typical western movie villain, since his character is more defined through the relations with his lawful subordinate Corporal Briggs (Erik Thomson) and his rookie son Sam (Samson Coulter).

There is a series of tropes the viewer has to endure through over the course of almost 2 hours of the runtime, especially in the character- and relations build-up department. The ending seems a bit prolonged and does not land that well due to the inflation of plot twists late in the movie. MacKay’s directing is somewhat textbook, along the lines of the contemporary festival-friendly movies that blend genre with historical and social activism.

But despite that, there is a lot to enjoy in this story told not too many times. The acting is solid throughout, but Ahmed Malek is a standout as Hanif especially in the way he channels different types of chemistry with the others, therefore creating the sense of compelling relations between the characters. On the technical plan, the cinematographer Michael McDermott should be commended for his work, not just for capturing the attractive desert vistas, but also for the use of the telling colour scheme that melts in haze of the golden tones.

“The Furnace” is a modernly packaged old school movie, crafty enough to be regarded as a good watch. The grade can be even higher, given that it is a debut. Roderick MacKay shows some promise to become a master filmmaker with his talent in finding and telling the interesting stories.