Hi friends!

It’s that special time of year… Sydney Film Festival is officially underway! And that means it’s the debut for a whole host of films made by exceptionally talented people. If you’re in town over the next two weeks, you’ll certainly see me at:

• Samuel’s sublime ghost story Went Up the Hill has its grand Sydney premiere at the Opera House tonight! You can also catch sessions on 8 & 11 June, ahead of its wider release later this year. The film is chock-full of gorgeous work from Samuel (naturally), his co-writer Jory Anast, Director of Photography Tyson Perkins, Production Designer Sherree Phillips, editor Dany Cooper and producing powerhouses Samantha Jennings, Kristina Ceyton & Vicky Pope — to name just a few of the people I’ve seen work like hell over the past couple of years to make this film the very best it could be.

• The Golden Spurtle is a charming documentary about the world championship porridge-making contest in Scotland. Shot by the incomparable Dimitri Zaunders and produced by the dazzling Rebecca Lamond, you’ll find it screening on 7, 14 & 15 June, with a big kick-off at the State Theatre!

• Death of an Undertaker is a docufiction hybrid set in a real funeral home in Leichhardt. It’s the decade-in-the-making brainchild of director/writer/producer/actor-extraordinaire Christian Byers (who’s incredible in Cooee, you just wait!), with sound by the unstoppable Luke Fuller. All of its sessions on 6 & 8 June are currently sold out, but keep an eye out for late-breaking tickets or added screenings.

I’m so impressed by these brilliant souls. And they’re just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to work by local filmmakers — I’m also excited to check out Slanted, written & directed by Amy Wang, and Lesbian Space Princess, written & directed by Emma Hough Hobbs & Leela Varghese. Please dig into the program and support Aussie artists!

And to top it all off, in general release worldwide is Bring Her Back — the new horror extravaganza from the Philippou brothers, shot by none other than our own stunner Aaron McLiskey. I caught the film last week, and while it’s not easygoing for the squeamish (I had to cover my eyes a few times), it’s fiendish and clever and as tremendously moving as it is unnerving, anchored by a superb performance from Sally Hawkins.

But before I disappear into the cinema for a straight week, I’ve written a little something about Andor. If you’ve seen Andor, which ended its second and final season last month, you don’t need me to tell you how good it is. If you haven’t, I recognise that the description “Star War prequel TV series airing on Disney+” might not inspire confidence. I’ll just say is that Andor is my favourite Star Wars anything I’ve ever seen — a smart, nuanced, political anti-fascist screed of a series that requires zero knowledge of space wizards to enjoy.

My piece looks at the show as a whole (with some Shakespeare thrown in for good measure), so if you haven’t finished it, be warned there are spoilers ahead. I suppose there are also spoilers for King Lear, if you’re a real stickler…

A peasant stand up thus!

One of my favourite characters in all of Shakespeare’s plays only appears for a single scene in King Lear. He has nine lines. Hell, he doesn’t even have a name. Yet he manages to turn the play upside down.

Towards the end of Lear’s third act, the elderly Earl of Gloucester has been captured by Lear’s odious daughter Regan and her husband, the Earl of Cornwall, betrayed by his bastard son and accused of treason. The old man is questioned, but his interrogators already know the answers. The cruelty is, as ever, the point. Gloucester is confused, then defiant. They torture him.

Shakespeare frequently shuffles his most gruesome bits of violence off-stage — we never see Macbeth murder Duncan, or the assassination of the princes in the tower, or Titus baking his enemies into pies — but poor Gloucester is not dragged out of sight. The scene keeps going. Regan mocks the helpless old man, plucking his beard. Cornwall grinds his boot into Gloucester’s face. They gouge his eye out.

We have to watch. 

And so do the background characters — those voiceless guards and servants who regularly fill out the stage in histories and tragedies, delivering messages and holding spears and moving the props around for their noble Lords and Ladies. But this time something snaps. As Cornwall prepares to rip out Gloucester’s other eye, one servant steps forward. On the page, he’s usually identified as ‘1 Servant’ or ‘First Servant’: no name, no description. He interrupts his master and begs him to stop:

The royal pair curse the him as “dog” and “villain”, but the servant doesn’t back down. Cornwall fights him, and when it appears that the servant might have the upper hand, an incredulous Regan hisses “a peasant stand up thus!” and stabs him in the back. The First Servant dies, and the torture of Gloucester continues.

This whole episode is all over in fifteen lines — less than a minute on stage or screen. Yet I think it’s one of the most powerful and profoundly moral moments in all of Shakespeare’s work; a rupture in the middle of the bleakest scene in the Bard’s bleakest tragedy. It’s also an anomaly. Peasants in Shakespeare are usually the fodder for comic hijinks (As You Like It) or easily-swayed members of a mob (Julius Caesar), but the circumstances in Lear have become so grim that even a peasant revolt might be preferable to these monsters taking charge. Shakespeare’s affinity is usually with the aristocracy who pay his bills, or the middle classes he’s a newfound member of, but with the First Servant he gives voice, however briefly, to an ordinary man.

Even today I think this is a radical beat. We don’t expect background extras to intrude on the plot; our stories clearly delineate what character ‘matter’. And this is especially true for mainstream, franchise-based storytelling, which is overrun with Chosen Ones and mystical powers and grand destinies — stories no less aristocratic in their impulses than Shakespeare’s plays centred on Princes, Kings and Emperors, even if these heroes sometimes wear tank tops.

That’s what makes Andor a genuine surprise. This is Star Wars stripped of Skywalkers, Sith and Jedi; even its flashiest heroes would only amount to background players in any other tale from this galaxy far, far away. Cassian Andor was one of the “rebel spies” mentioned in the opening text crawl of A New Hope; Senator Mon Mothma turned up briefly in Return of the Jedi to drop exposition; the rest would have been lucky to score an invite to the medal ceremony in which Luke, Han and Leia were fêted in the original trilogy. But showrunner Tony Gilroy takes advantage of the series’ ancillary nature — it’s a prequel to a prequel (Rogue One) after all — to drill into how, exactly, a revolution takes shape. His focus is on flawed, otherwise unremarkable people living under an oppressive fascist regime who, like the First Servant, are brought to their breaking point.

Gilroy has made a series that speaks to our own age without resorting to glib contemporary parallels (the fascists in Andor thankfully never call to “Make Alderaan Great Again”). The series was concieved before the Russian invasion of Ukraine; its latest season was written before the war in Gaza; and its last frame was shot long before Trump returned to the White House. Yet every episode teems with disturbingly familiar atrocities: migrants being harassed, detained and abused, prisoners enlisted to perform slave labour, the massacre of protestors, and brazen acts of genocide. That Gilroy’s touchstones are instead historical — he draws heavily on the Russian Revolution, anti-apartheid resistance in South Africa, and of course life under the Nazis — is a curt reminder that so much of this has happened before, and the battles must be fought again and again.

In his essay ‘The World’s Last Night’, Narnia author and part-time Christian theologian C.S. Lewis reflects on the significance of the First Servant in King Lear:

Andor has no shortage of high-status characters who nurse fine long-term plans: first are the agents of the ISB, headed by the clinical Major Partagaz and tenacious Dedra Meero, who strive to enforce Imperial rule and quash the nascent rebellion. Set against them is an equally adept schemer, the Rebel spymaster Luthen Rael. Luthen operates according to a grim calculus — underwriting terrorism and assassination, sacrificing his allies when necessary, and provoking Imperial repression in order to spur radicalisation. Unlike his enemies, Luthen knows he is damned; his efforts are in service of a brighter future that will have no need of men like him. Hence Luthen is not surprised by his ignominious end; whereas Partagaz and Meero are bewildered to discover that events have slipped beyond their control, and that the system they have nourished is equally willing to devour them in turn. They think they know how the story is going to end, and they too are quite wrong.

The lesson C.S. Lewis takes from the First Servant is primarily spiritual; because we cannot foresee the promised end (i.e. the Second Coming of Christ) or comprehend our role in the greater plan, the best any of us can do is to act righteously in the moment. “Playing it well is what matters infinitely,” Lewis concludes. Or, in the more often cited words of Lewis’ close friend J.R.R. Tolkien and his man Gandalf: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

In Andor’s case, the future has been pre-ordained not by God, but by George Lucas. The characters in this sprawling ensemble do not realise they are bit players in a wider story that will climax with the destruction of the Empire’s super-weapon by a force-sensitive goofball from Tatooine — but we do. Whereas most prequels suffer because knowing the end point drains away the tension, Andor uses our knowledge to its advantage. We are aware that the rebellion will itself succeed, but not whether this cast of labourers, petty criminals, bureaucrats, politicians, insurgents, radicals and spies will see the the promised sunrise, or what they may have to sacrifice on the way. Morality thus becomes the crux of the series; its value system is one Lewis and Tolkien would recognise, in which great weight is given to selfless, even futile, acts spurred by love, truth and pity.

Early in Andor’s first season we meet a young revolutionary, Nemik, who devotes his every spare minute on the far-flung world of Adani scribbling a manifesto in his journal — a yearning, idealistic cry in the dark that doubles as the series’ own. He writes:

Time and time again, the series spotlights characters who, like the First Servant, briefly step out of the background in random acts of insurrection. Some have multi-episode arcs; others only feature in a single scene. We recognise, even if they cannot, how they are pushing the lines forward; they are all the more heroic for being unware of a wider destiny, or their part in it.

There is Kino Loy, the floor manager at an imperial prison who helps to facilitate a mass break-out, despite knowing that he will be unable to escape himself.

Or Niya, a worker at a weapons facility who helps the rebels steal a weapons prototype, and wonders aloud if the likely consequence — her death — will be worth it.

Or Thela, a bellhop at a hotel on Ghorman, who ‘forgets’ to log Cassian into the Imperial system, and later lobs a grenade from his desk at the Stormtroopers massacring civilians outside the hotel doors.

Or the two unnamed maintenance workers at the Senate who practice ‘malicious compliance’ and refuse to open the door to the communications relay, allowing Mon Mothma’s speech decrying the Ghorman genocide to continue broadcasting for a precious extra minute.

None of these people come to the struggle with clean hands. They’ve all been complicit in some way; cogs in the infernal machine who before their moment of bravery spent years keeping their head down and doing their jobs. The First Servant was the same: he was one of the men who dragged Gloucester into the room, tied him up, and stood by as he ridiculed and tortured. He intervened only as Cornwall reached for the old man’s second eye. Institutional evil can be easily obscured by bourgeois aspirations, the desire for belonging, and the thrum of everyday life — it can take an outright abomination, seen with your own eyes, to break free. Andor holds out hope even for Syril Karn, the corporate cop turned civil servant who clings to the belief that the Empire is a source of justice and stability… right up until he’s is trapped inside an excruciatingly sequence of state-sponsored violence alongside the audience. Syril teeters on the edge of revelation — only to pull back when he sees Cassian in the crowd, and instead opts to take his long-festering rage out on his imagined nemesis.

In a posthumous speech pre-recorded for her funeral, Maarva Andor grapples with the problem of her life of inaction:

At first glance, Andor could be seen as a chronicle of failure: pyrrhic victories, pointless deaths, useless infighting, collective action and peaceful protest met with horrific violence. The same might be said for the First Servant’s random act of insurrection. He dies unmourned, and Gloucester’s torture continues. But the unnamed servant’s bravery has a ripple effect on the action of the play. In the struggle, he wounded Cornwall — a wound that proves fatal, leading the alliance of the play’s villains to fracture. And as the royals leave the stage, his fellow servants speak for the first time; his sacrifice inspires them to tacitly disobey their orders to “go thrust him [Gloucester] out at gates”, and instead bandage the blinded man and guide him to safety. Without the disintegration of Regan’s alliance and Gloucester’s reunion with his faithful son Edgar, there might be no decent people left standing at the climax of Shakespeare’s famously bleak play. Thanks to the First Servant, there remains a glimmer of hope.

Shortly before the Ghorman Massacre, Cassian farewells Thela the bellhop with a pained “I hope things work out for you”. Thela responds earnestly: “Rebellions are built on hope.” They met only briefly, and Cassian is only dimly aware of how this unassuming young man has watched his back, but nonetheless the phrase stays with him. In Rogue One, set one year later, Cassian repeats it to new recruit Jyn Erso as though it were a personal credo; and she carries it forward, to Scarif and the Rebellion’s first true victory. So the original Star Wars films become Andor’s improbable coda; the legend that both honours and obliterates the decades of toil that made it possible.

Like their counterparts in King Lear, Andor’s background players receive no earthly reward for their heroism; the story barrels on without Loy or Niya or Thela or the maintenance workers or the protesters on Ferrix. Their names are left unrecorded; their fates are unknown. But the Rebellion’s triumph would have been impossible without them.

I believe Andor is a work as profoundly moral as it is brazenly political. It’s important anti-fascist art, not because it parrots easy contemporary talking points, but because it pierces the veil of fantasy that separates us from this galaxy far, far away. By denying us the escapism of supernatural heroics and chosen heroes in favour of a ground-level perspective on authoritarianism and rebellion, it asks us — demands us — to consider how we respond to the abominations in our own world. Do we linger silently in the background as the environment is ravaged, as migrants are arrested, as protesters are expelled, and as a genocide is carried out, or do we stand up and shout “hold!”? Call it hope or call it faith, Andor affirms that it is never too late for us to wake up and fight the bastards.

Odds & Ends

• Speaking of old William Shakespeare — the recent discovery of a letter addressed to “good Mrs Shakespeare” in London suggests that Anne Hathaway did in fact often live in the city with her playwriting husband during his creative peak, potentially upend the conventional view of their relationship as distant and estranged. I suspect many a biography is being re-written and researched at this very minute…

• How do you recreate the White House for the big screen? This fascinating piece tracks the history of one of the most popular White House sets ever made, featured in dozens of movies but put together with just $90,000 and little bit of spywork.

• And a short look at the evolution of the Criterion Closet, every film nerd’s dream destination.

And that’s it for this week, thanks for reading! I’ll be back next time with festival impressions and a historical tidbit or two…