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Poetry and Murder in Tasmania
After success at the Melbourne International Film Festival, What Ever Happened to Brenda Hean will now get a national release
Even in the idiosyncratic world of documentary filmmaking, Tasmania's Scott Millwood (Proximity, Wildness) stands apart, once telling a master class that "most of the work I've made has been influenced a lot by poetry." He's backed up that peculiar claim with this year's Whatever Happened to Brenda Hean? - a non-fiction that could only be better told in dirge form.
The film covers the disappearance, under suspicious circumstances, of conservationist Brenda Hean and a pilot, Max Price, in 1972 in a plane en route to Canberra to meet with federal officials about the damning of Lake Pedder in southwest Tasmania. Portrayed as a single battle in the larger war between industry and environment, the film treats the disappearances as murders, with Millwood actively campaigning for new information, interviewing fresh witnesses, digging up decades of stifled investigations and unveiling political motives against Hean's groundbreaking environmental advocacy.
Before her death, Hean had planned to skywrite "Save Lake Peddler" over Parliament House - which would have been further embarrassment for legislators actively campaigning to flood the lake, which had, until 1967, been protected by the Tasmanian government from industrial infringement. "The secrecy surrounding the question of what happened to these environmental champions was extraordinary", says Millwood now.
While such a stance might seem speculative or sensational to some, the director stands by his film and insists that the research will back up his rather sensitive claims. "And I was determined to uncover the facts and the overwhelming public response indicated they too wanted to know: what did the Government know? Who killed Brenda Hean and Max Price?" he asks. "What we found was an incredible patchwork of information, revealing where the plane flew, where the wreckage was seen on the day of the crash, how the investigative process was stifled and who might have had a motive for murder. It now seems clear that Brenda Hean was a martyr to her cause." Personally and financially dedicated to the case, the filmmaker offered a reward of up to $100,000 for new information about Hean and Price's death and established a hotline to field tips in 2007.
Premiering to great response at the Melbourne International Film Festival in late July, the film will now release through Gil Scrine Films and Big & Little Films, showing at the State Theatre in Hobart from October 3 and Melbourne's Cinema Nova from October 9. It will open in cinemas in Adelaide and Sydney in mid-October. Millwood's book, Whatever Happened to Brenda Hean?, will be available in bookshops from October 1.