All in the Family: Three Australian Women Directors

Brian McFarlane November 29

Sarah Watt’s My Year without Sex, Rachel Ward’s Beautiful Kate and Ana Kokkinos’s Blessed – three brave, incisive films by three equally strong and talented directors. In an industry that is still sadly dominated by men, these women have charged into tough new territory, creating a trio of films that show the harder edge of family life and love. In the September issue of Meanjin, Brian McFarlane pays tribute to each of their distinctive visions – a brief extract is below, and you can read the full essay on our editions page.

By any standards, apart perhaps from box-office takings, 2009 was a banner year for Australian films. There were Balibo and Samson and Delilah, Disgrace and Last Ride, but what is really impressive is that three of the most memorable entries in this memorable year were directed by women, in an industry where direction has long been dominated by men.

I don’t want to make any special, essentialist point about what’s attracting women directors: male directors have been just as often drawn to the conflicts that rend families (think of such recent Australian films as Steve Jacobs’ Disgrace, Tony Ayres’ The Home Song Stories, Glendyn Ivin’s Last Ride, Dean Murphy’s Charlie & Boots). I just want to celebrate three very significant films by women directors. On the international scene, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker has won and been nominated for numerous awards, and neither in this nor her earlier films has the family been the site of her chief interest. Perhaps film directing is no longer a male preserve, and women directors are not to be confined by the parameters of what used to be patronisingly characterised as ‘the women’s picture’.

With this sort of proviso understood, the three major films I want to highlight here—Sarah Watt’s My Year without Sex, Rachel Ward’s Beautiful Kate and Ana Kokkinos’s Blessed—indeed foreground family matters and do so with rigour and perception, but there the similarities end.