by Julian Wood
Worth: $14.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Carlie Atkinson, Judy Atkinson, Harper Dalton
Intro:
… the human story is touching …
In a world marked increasingly by man-made climate change, our sense of priorities is going to have to change too. Everybody knows this, but it is one thing to have book knowledge and another thing to experience firsthand.
The little town of Lismore, about 50km inland from Byron Bay, is a kind of test case in a way. Director Jordan Giusti has made a simple but affecting little documentary concentrating upon the stories of a few Lismore inhabitants. They are presented as ordinary folk who dream of having a simple home. They can’t afford the fancy places up on the heights and they are basically living in a flood plain. When the rain comes down, inches per hour for days on end, the Wilson River spreads out inexorably over whole sections of the town. The residents show us doors marked with the various high-water marks of previous floods (1.4 metres and so on), but each flood seems to be fiercer as it swallows more of their homes. In 2022, an aerial view of the place makes it look like an inland sea with some roofs poking out.
It is heartbreaking for the residents to talk about how they still love the place. On a dry day, you can look out over a beautiful valley. “That would be a million-dollar view in Sydney”, one resident jokes, but against that, we have to consider the soggy remains once the brown tide has washed away most of their hopes.
Some residents are angry when they tell us that the government says it will fix things, but people are still allowed to build there. One of the younger residents has become radicalised by this and wants to go into local politics. Allowing speculative rebuilding in a flood zone and screwing the residents in the process is ‘disaster capitalism’, he tells us.
The age-old wisdom of the Aboriginal people is an important counterpoint to all this, and the director knows it. The elders featured tell us quite clearly, “we told you not to build there, it floods”. In the past, the Aboriginal people were mobile enough to go to the high ground when necessary. Not so the whitefellas with their attachment to fixed property.
This is not a groundbreaking (sorry) documentary in terms of how it is filmed, (it feels a little bit like an episode of Four Corners), but the human story is touching enough.
