Wednesday, June 10, 2009

A NEW AUSTRALIAN MOVIE: MISSING WATER

It’s been my great privilege to be involved with a relatively small Australian movie this past year or so.

It’s called Missing Water.

Written and directed by Khoa Do (The Finished People, Footy Legends) it tells the tale of a quiet factory worker recalling her flight from post-war Vietnam in a river boat. With three other refugees, she takes to the open sea in the little boat, searching for freedom.

The story is told in a most original way, with the stark concrete factory around the characters morphing into the river boat. Sound and lighting, however, reflect the scene being depicted (so you hear water lapping, the flashing lights of police boats, moonlight etc.). Shot on the incredible Oakley RED camera, it looks stunning and is truly an achievement in visionary filmmaking.

HOW I GOT INVOLVED

Khoa asked me to act as script editor on his Missing Water script a few years ago. I thought it was a terrific story. More than that, I thought it was a story that all Australians should see. We see asylum seekers arriving on our shores on the television news—but we never really see what those asylum seekers go through on their way here.

Missing Water tells us what they go through. And it isn’t pretty. It will transform the way you see asylum seekers.

A word of warning, however. Missing Water is nothing like a ‘Matthew Reilly novel’. It is a pretty serious film. It is bleak and it depicts some rather horrifying scenes. (One radio interviewer asked how such an odd couple like Khoa Do and Matthew Reilly could come to collaborate on such a film. My answer was simple: whether it’s an escapist, fun novel or a deeply introspective film, a good story is a good story, and Khoa’s script was good.)

In the end, I thought the film was so important that I helped finance it. I’ve made decent money from selling the movie rights to some of my novels to Hollywood studios and it’s nice to be able to funnel that money back into the Australian film industry and into a movie that is so obviously not commercial but which I thought should be made.

IN COMPETITION: THE SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL

In any case, Missing Water was recently selected as one of the twelve films to be in Official Competition at the Sydney Film Festival. This is an awesome achievement.

And so, it’s my pleasure to inform you that:

Missing Water will have its world premiere at the Sydney Film Festival on Tuesday, June 9 at the State Theatre in Sydney at 6:30 pm. There will be a Q&A after the screening and I will be there. (It will also have an encore screening at 10 am on Wednesday, June 10.)

I hope you see it sometime.