Oz Shorts
Two feature length programs screening on alternate nights until mid-DecemberAcademy Twin, Paddington and then in selected cinemas in most capital cities
Reviewed by Norm Dixon
When I was a just a little tacker, the highlight of the week was the Saturday arvo matinee at the Roxy or the Astra in Parramatta. We'd turn up hours before the show was due to start, wander around the mostly closed shops creating what we thought was mayhem, then buy a hamburger for lunch — a real one with beetroot, onions, bacon and egg — from "Cockroach Charlie's" in Argyle Street.
Once inside the "picture show", we'd buy a box of Maltesers and strategically position ourselves in the dress-circle, from where unsuspecting patrons downstairs in the stalls could be bombed mercilessly with chocolate-coated projectiles during the shorts that preceded the main feature.
These days such delights are harder to come by. The Astra no longer operates, and the Roxy has been turned into a mega-multi-screen-computerised-movie-production line. The shops stay open all day Saturday, and the only hamburgers available are the pre-digested muck from McDonald's. Most theatres these days have no dress circles.
And cinemas, sadly, seldom show shorts before the main feature. The shorts showed in my youth were often weird, often strange and often funny. Mostly they went straight over my head, but I have vivid memories of some, like the one where an animated cockroach's idyllic life story comes to a sudden end beneath the heel of an animated human's shoe.
The not so gradual change from the local picture show to multi-screen, poorly staffed, get-'em-in-get-'em-out operations based in large population centres run by a couple of entertainment monopolies has had many consequences. Among others, it has deprived new and experimental film makers of an outlet for their work.
With Oz Shorts, two programs of new short films put together by Ronin Films, this may change. Ronin hopes that Oz Shorts will become an annual showcase for quality short film making. Optimistically, they believe the program's success may even encourage distributors to again begin to screen shorts before their features.
The 12 films selected cover the full range from the funny, the serious, the surreal and animations. Amongst the best are Catherine Birmingham's Drive, a taut "road" film which follows the flight of a mother and son after a desperate act.
Director Stuart McDonald's Mr Electric, starring Ernie Dingo, Leverne McDonnell and Daryl Pellizzer (pictured), is a fascinating story set in the '50s dealing with a classic love triangle, the question of stolen Aboriginal children and racism. Dingo and McDonnell are brilliant. A similar theme is tackled in a more surreal way in Anne Pratten's Terra Nullius.
Humour abounds too. There's the totally sick animated joke Sunday. The clever Just Desserts recounts writer/director Monica Pellizzari's growing up in an Italian Catholic family in Australia through the associations of memories to food. Etcetera in Paper Jam is a bizarre real-life animation of technology gone berserk.
Oz Shorts is a great innovation, and Ronin Films should be highly commended for its initiative in attempting to revive this marvellous form of entertainment. And if a Malteser whistles past your ear, it wasn't me.