by Dov Kornits
“Filmmaking is my first love,” says Damian Walshe-Howling, best known as an actor. “I wasn’t going to make another short, and then Kat Dominis and Mariana Rudan approached me with this story.”
The story is what became Unspoken, a powerful, beautifully made and acted 20-minute short film, Walshe-Howling’s fourth as a director. It is also Kat Dominis’ and Mariana Rudan’s first as co-writers and producers.
Unspoken is set in 1979 Sydney as two families are fractured due to Croation independence protests and police strong-arming.
It’s a story that could speak to what is happening right now on our streets due to the Palestine/Israeli conflict, but Walshe-Howling was making this film way before 7 October 2023.
“It actually has a whole lot related to my upbringing,” says Walshe-Howling ahead of the film’s world premiere at Flickerfest. “My mum [Iris] came out on the boat from Italy in the fifties, and her father fought in the Second World War. He was very anti-war when I was growing up as a kid. He was very staunch and pretty much left Italy because he was against what the Italian government had been doing at the time with the fascists. And also, what’s really interesting is that Kat had written this story between a Croatian girl and an Anglo boy. When mum read the script, she was like, ‘this is fucking crazy’.”
Iris Walshe-Howling is an actress and theatre maker, who married a non-Italian. In the early scenes of Unspoken, the lead (played by Kat Dominis) sneaks out of the house to meet her Anglo boyfriend’s family.
Growing up, Damian would watch Iris perform at Melbourne’s legendary La Mama Theatre. “I used to lie on the floorboards, locked on to what was happening with the performers,” he says today. “I just love watching people develop and self-devise, and I’m really about giving the actors freedom, but very much also about saying to them, ‘forget the fucking story, forget the idea of a character, just work with the other person’.”
This approach extended to Damian’s collaboration with Kat and Mariana, with the filmmaker expanding on their initial idea and also coming up with the title, which acts as a particularly profound closer to the film, backed by an Aphex Twin track. “We were all sitting around in a room one day chatting. And then we asked, ‘what is the title’ … And all of a sudden there was silence in the room. It was silent for about four minutes. We all had a glass of wine in our hand, and no one said anything. And then out of that silence, suddenly I said, ‘unspoken’.”
Like all good things, following the success of Unspoken, Damian Walshe-Howling is back talking about making his feature debut as a director, or maybe even developing this story into a series. “It’s set against the backdrop of the Croatian Six,” he says, referring to a story that has been in the headlines lately.
Unspoken screens at Flickerfest International Short Film Festival on 21 January 2024
