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Hitting Home. Day 7 of Sydney Film Fest. A Daily Blog.
On the 7th day of the festival, Filmink went along to the world premiere of Missing Water from former Australian of the year Khoa Do (The Finished People, Footy Legends), based on his play Mother Fish.
It's an affecting, emotional and experimental third feature from Do, and a very personal one at that, telling the story of a small group of Vietnamese refugees taking a treacherous journey by boat to Australia in 1980. The film begins as Kim, a factory worker recalls the fateful events of the boat trip, metaphorically re-imagined in the factory which now represents a weathered boat in which young Kim (Kathy Nguyen), her younger sister Hahn (Sheena Pham) and relative strangers ‘Uncle' (Hieu Phan) and Chau (Vico Thai) are on a perilous journey to America, or so they think. The clever sound design of lapping waves and purring boat engines let us know this, in case of any doubt. The factory and its sewing machines gradually start to deteriorate - representing the psychological state of the refugees - resembling the rickety boat. It's a bold film from Do in that it asks a lot of the audience, in the sense that viewers really need to work hard to use their imagination especially in the story's infancy, where the metaphorical boat still looks like the aforementioned factory - it's like playing a game of make believe. That is perhaps the film's major challenge. But making a bold decision requires an investment from the audience and if you give in to the journey it's an emotional and rewarding one. While each of the relatively inexperienced cast seem on shaky ground at first, it's not long before each comes into their own, their performances undoubtedly a challenge given they are acting in the very same restricted locale we see, imagining the horror of pirate attacks, rape and extreme hunger and dehydration, not to mention the potential horror of cannibalism (what is it with cannibalism in the line-up this year?). All the cast are integral in making the journey believable and it's a credit to them that they pull this off, particularly the young Nguyen and Pham. Do should be congratulated for bringing what must have been a difficult story to tell to the big screen - his own family made the traumatic journey - and for making the challenging creative decision he has made. The following day the cast and crew took part in an entertaining and emotional Q & A - Phan was himself a refugee as was Nguyen's mother. Do spoke about the genesis of the story and his creative choices. "About 8 or 9 years ago, I was working on my first short film which was called Delivery Day," he said. "One of the stars in it was Hieu Phan and during that film, Hieu comes over and he says ‘Khoa, one day, you know what film you gotta make? You've gotta make a film about the Vietnamese boat people and about the Vietnamese refugees." Eight years later I called Hieu up - he's a full time engineer - and said ‘What are you doing? I need you to take some time off because we're going to try and make this story happen.' It's a story I've been wanting to tell for a very long time. "The idea of the sweatshop was the whole idea of going into the mind of a refugee. It was always going to be a story that was a very intimate and personal one. So many Vietnamese Australians have been sewing in factories for many years and we thought, ‘wouldn't it be great to go into the environment in which they're actually working and actually go back and relive the journey with them and have the journey take place in the world that they've been spending the last 25 years of their life?" Missing Water is part of the official competition for the $60,000 prize and is tentatively slated for release later this year or early next year. Red Carpet Watch - Khoa Do and comedian brother Anh as well as the Missing Water cast and crew at the film's world premiere. John Woo for the Australian premiere of Red Cliff.
