In the Sydney writer and director Imogen Thomas’s feature film Emu Runner, audiences see the world through the eyes of an Indigenous girl, Gem Daniels. The nine-year-old Ngemba girl idolises her mother, who knows all about country: the animals, the trees, the stars. When her mum unexpectedly dies, Gem bonds with her totem animal, a wild emu.
The film has achieved much with materially little, built on an “ultra-low budget”, says Thomas, including two crowdfunding campaigns and “the goodwill of many people”. Featuring the debut performance of Rhae-Kye Waites, who was 11 at the time the film was made, alongside the well-known actor Wayne Blair as her father, Emu Runner was shot on location at Brewarrina in north-western New South Wales.
The director worked with a Ngemba consultant, Frayne Barker, and sees her first feature as drawing attention to underlying racial tensions in regional areas and the shorter life expectancy of Indigenous Australians. But it’s not clear yet whether we’ll see the film at the multiplex.
Local indie films usually get limited commercial runs in cinemas, even if they get a couple of slots in international festivals. Certainly, our preferred venue is the living room. Streaming services such as Netflix, Stan and Foxtel Now have radically altered our viewing habits: Australians see only one in 10 first-release films at the cinema. But demand is not the entire story.
Australians want to see our own diverse stories writ large on screen, but we are getting limited chances to do so because we are being sorely deprived early in the supply chain. Australia produces more feature films today than ever before – an average 35 a year this decade, with 41 made in 2016-17 – but more than a third have to be independently distributed.
Last December’s federal House of Representatives report on the inquiry into the Australian film and television industry, for instance, noted that “cinematic distribution is out of reach to most Australian producers”, meaning many Australian film-makers are locked out of cinemas. Australian producers too often lack the resources to compete with the massive marketing budgets of US films, while Hollywood cinema distributors dominate our screens. Like stocks in supermarkets, the bigger the marketing spend, the greater the shelf space accorded at the local multiplex.
If Emu Runner, which had its Australian premiere on Sunday at the Adelaide film festival, proves to be the exception to the rule, that’s partly because it was feted by the Toronto film festival, where it was programmed for its world premiere in September. This overseas festival attention has sparked distributor interest in the film, says Thomas, although negotiations are continuing and a distribution deal is yet to be signed.
Emu Runner of course will probably be entered in next year’s Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts awards, because these coveted prizes draw Australians’ attention to the movies we are missing, alongside the buzz of programming in foreign film festivals and overseas critics seeing merit in our stories. While this year’s ceremony, to be held in Sydney on 3 December, boasts a record 38 Australian feature films vying for the nation’s highest screen accolades, you won’t be aware of many of these titles given their scarcity at cinemas.
To ensure Australian films continue to get made, the government should act on the recommendations of the Make it Australian letter signed by 200 Australian screen industry figures, including 15 Oscar winners, to provide competitive tax incentives for producers, to attract international films that will help sustain local stories as part of that ecology. But cinemas and distributors need greater incentives to take on Australian films.
To take local films beyond life at the cinema, Australian content quotas that now apply to commercial broadcasters should be extended to streaming services such as Netflix and Stan, and there should be stipulation that Australian films be a mandatory part of the mix. Netflix is now accessed by 9.8 million Australians, according to Roy Morgan data published in August. Yet Netflix only offers 2.5% Australian content, according to Screen Australia.
Government funding cuts to Australian film and television production in recent years have seen investment by commercial broadcasters in Australian TV drama drop across the board. While Screen Australia’s 27th annual drama report shows record spending across Australian film and television drama of $1.3bn in 2016-17, largely driven by feature films with the highest level yet of foreign spend ($567m) that’s not not necessarily spent on Australian stories, as the animated 3D film and Aacta entrant The Lego Ninjago Movie, with a $US70m budget, attests.
The Aacta feature film award entries this year that have the heft of a commercial distributor behind them have had cinema outings across the capital cities: for instance, Bruce Beresford’s Ladies in Black (distributed by Sony), Simon Baker’s Breath (Roadshow), Stephan Elliott’s Swinging Safari (Becker Film Group) and Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country (Transmission). But more than one third of those in competition are independently distributed, so even if you are an ardent Aussie film fan, you might not recognise Angie Black’s The Five Provocations, Alena Lodkina’s Strange Colours, Alexandros Lykos’s Me & My Left Brain, Jon-Claire Lee’s Innocent Killer or John Soto’s The Gateway.
How do you get to see those films? Screen professionals and industry practitioners can buy an Aacta membership and see them at special screenings each September. If you are a member of the general public you could keep your eyes peeled – intensely – for the cinema listings, but you’d need to be quick. To qualify for the Aactas, a film only needs to be shown in commercial cinemas in two capital cities for seven consecutive days – fewer if it gets a run at a film festival or on a streaming platform (such as the erotic thriller The Second).
The Screen Producers Australia chief executive, Matthew Deaner, tells me that streaming platforms are globally becoming the “dominant commissioners” but are “competing for Australian audiences without any of the obligations that broadcasters have to Australian audiences. It’s inevitable that the streaming services will come within a regulatory environment to commission Australian content.”
These streaming services could potentially become key players in commissioning and funding new Australian films, not just long-form television drama – which means Australians might be able to see more of the excellent Australian films being made. But for that to happen, we need leaders who care enough about who we are to put these stories where we can find them.