NFSA celebrates the legacy of Australian actor Heath Ledger with a new curated collection, ten years after his passing.

1985 A sensitive drama that slowly builds in power, "1985" feels like a missing minor classic from the decade that preceded the rise of the so-called New Queer Cinema, when independent filmmakers had to struggle to cobble together budgets that let them tell their stories in the form of modest art house movies.

Bardi artist creates ‘Barnamboo’ print

Aussie swimwear brand Funky Trunks has collaborated with Bardi artist Ashley Hunter to create an iconic aboriginal print. The Barnamboo, which means Stingray in Bardi, is inspired by stories of the Indigenous elders. 

WONDER WOMAN OPENS 1 JUNE 2017

It’s been a long time coming – too damn long, really! – but we finally have a female superhero film. Debuting in the comics in 1941, and brought to life on TV in the 1970s by Lynda Carter, Wonder Woman finally gets the big screen treatment – and with a female director at the helm (Patty Jenkins, Monster). Like the first season of the TV show, Wonder Woman takes place during war, but this time WWI, when the Amazonian princess, Diana (Gal Gadot), rescues US pilot Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) and is drawn away from Paradise Island and into the wider, more dangerous world of man.

GOD'S OWN COUNTRY
OPENS 31 AUGUST 2017

Comparisons are odious, but when it comes to movies, they are often inevitable. So it is that this film has been favourably called the 'British Brokeback Mountain'...

BOOK CLUB
OPENS 23 AUGUST

While the Fifty Shades phenomenon may have cum, sorry, come and gone, this comedy wrings more than a few laughs from that book’s erotic reputation...

SOLO: A STAR WAR STORY | OPENS 24 MAY 2018

Some fans may not have been happy with the fate of Harrison Ford’s iconic Star Wars character in The Force Awakens, but it was probably foolish to think that Disney would let Han Solo go that easily. Here then we have an origin story of sorts, with Alden Ehrenreich (Hail, Caesar!) playing the young Solo about to embark on the first of many action-packed and illegal adventures. Contrary to his name, he’s joined by a rag-tag crew, including Woody Harrelson, Donald Glover and Emilia Clarke, not to mention a certain 190-year-old Wookie. Ron Howard (Apollo 13) is at the helm of this space adventure. 

In his fourth feature, writer-director David Lowery tells a story of grief; one uniquely told (as the title suggests) from the point of view of the deceased. 'Not so unique,' you say. 'Jerry Zucker's 1990 film Ghost did just that.' Well, yes. Kind of.

But Lowery's film is no supernatural drama where a dead man is helped pass over to the 'other side' by a streetwise, sassy-mouthed psychic. For one, it's near dialogue-free.

From Robert Zemeckis, Academy Award-winning director of Forrest Gump, as well as Flight and Cast Away, comes an intense, seductive thriller starring Oscar winners Brad Pitt (World War Z, Inglorious Bastards) and Marion Cotillard (Assassin’s Creed, Two Days, One Night).

Set against the backdrop of World War II in French Morocco, Pitt and Cotillard play two of the world’s deadliest spies who fall in love while undercover on enemy lines. It is Casablanca, 1942. Allied counter intelligence agent Max (Pitt) assumes the identity of husband to famous French resistance spy, Marianne (Cotillard), who is also working undercover. The pair effortlessly poses as a married couple while covertly colluding to assassinate a German diplomat.

Born with an energetic power to absorb fear from others, a young woman must find love to balance the fears of her own and fight an ever growing storm of negative energy.

Ten years before a bus christened Priscilla carried two drag queens and a transsexual from the safety of inner Sydney into the Australian outback, another bus full of queers undertook a similarly potentially fraught journey: from London into the Welsh mining community of Onllwyn. 

The year was 1984 and Britain’s coal miners were on strike against the conservative Thatcher government’s plans to close coal pits across the country. Recognising a similarly oppressed community, a band of gay and lesbian activists, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), decided to throw their small but passionate support behind the striking miners, raising funds and organising food drives. Strange bedfellows to be sure but then again, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, no?

That is the basis for Pride, directed by Matthew Warchus and penned by first-time screenwriter, Stephen Beresford; a none-too-subtle but wholly sincere retelling of those events which had almost been lost to the public consciousness. Indeed, many of the cast, and Beresford himself, have admitted in interviews that they’d never heard of LGSM and their involvement in those tumultuous events of 1984-85.

“Most people don’t really believe this story when they first hear it and I was the same, but a tiny part of me thought if that’s true it’s an incredible story. I really thought it was a myth, but was intrigued. I looked it up and found a tiny reference to it,” Beresford explains in the film’s production notes. “Years and years later

I happened upon a book with a passage about Mark Ashton, which confirmed it was true. I knew then, that I had to write it. I then discovered that the LGSM (Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners) had made their own video which I tracked down and that was the beginning, but it was a long time gestating.”

Led by young radical, Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer, unrecognisable from last year’s The Book Thief), and viewed through the eyes of the closeted Joe (George MacKay). Joe lives at home with his parents and at age 20 is still considered a minor in the eyes of the law when it comes to the homosexual act. Through Joe’s we watch this band of idealistic misfits — including Jonathan (Dominic West), a middle-aged actor and one of the first people in Britain to be diagnosed with AIDS; and Steph (Faye Marsay), initially the only woman contributing the ‘L’ in LGSM) — rally in support of the strikers. 

When LGSM take their fundraising directly to the source (the Unions refusing to accept the donations once they hear who it’s from), events take an unlikely turn.

After first meeting in London with Dai ((Paddy Considine), a representative of the pit from the Welsh village of Onllwyn, the troop pack into a small bus and head to Wales to accept the invitation of thanks extended by the Dulais Valley community centre. 

But not everyone in this small, working class community is happy to welcome these outsiders, despised as much for being from London as they are for being ‘homosexualists’. And while the local men, excepting Dai and club secretary Cliff (Bill Nighy, in a rare subdued performance), keep their distance, it’s the town’s womenfolk — led by the headstrong Hefina (Imelda Staunton), the inquisitive Gwen (Menna Trussler), and young firebrand, Sian (Jessica Gunning) — who embrace their out-of-town supporters.  

Of course, Rome wasn’t built in a day and the relationship between the Onllwyn community and LGSM experiences many ups and downs (some factual, some as part of necessary dramatic license) over the course of their almost 12 month long struggle. The London media gets wind of the oddball coupling, dubbing them ‘Perverts for Pits’, with LGSM embracing the term like so many derogatory names the gay movement has reclaimed before them (the miners not so much). There’s also personal issues to be dealt with within each community.   

The film itself tackles many issues — gay rights, worker’s right, coming out, AIDS, female empowerment — some of it cliche and not all of it with a light touch. But there is an honesty and a sincerity to both the comedy and the drama in Pride, which tonally sits somewhere between the sledgehammer feel-good of The Full Monty (1997) and the emotional authenticity of Billy Elliot (2000). But it would take the hardest of hearts not to be won over by the film’s charm. You may also need a tissue or two, whether you’re a teen in suburban Canberra yet to come out to your family, or a big burly coal miner in Western Australia. 

Make no mistake, Pride is a feel good film but in the best possible sense. It celebrates two communities coming together and moving forward; not through tolerance but through acceptance and co-operation. A remembrance of victories passed, Pride may also serve as a rallying cry for battles still to be won.

PRIDE is now available on DVD. Thanks to Entertainment One FUSE has five copies to giveaway. Reviewed for FUSE by Dwayne Lennox — thelennoxfiles.blogspot.com.au

Pride tells the incredible true story of a Welsh mining community struggling to make ends meet during the 1984 miners’ strike, when hope arrives with the unlikeliest of allies – a group of gay and lesbian activists who decide to raise money for the miners. A rousing British crowd-pleaser in the spirit of Billy Elliot and The Full Monty, starring Bill Nighy and Imelda Staunton, Pride is a funny, affecting and truly inspiring film about two seemingly opposite communities who unite to form an extraordinary bond.

Flashback! The Hollywood film industry has always had a high percentage of gay and lesbian employees, drawn to the theatre as a world of creativity, open mindedness and experimentation. Yet the hypocrisy is that as gay as Hollywood was (and is), actors have had to pretend that it isn’t.