Hi friends!

Thanks for sticking around for the second newsletter! It’s been a long time since I’ve shared words this directly (screenwriting takes a whole lot longer to reach its audience!), and I'm so grateful for everyone’s lovely responses.

We’re in the midst of awards season, which doesn’t just mean a deluge of statues for Christopher Nolan and Lily Gladstone (although that too) — it’s also been wonderful to see a number of projects I’ve worked on over the past few years getting their well-deserved flowers:

• The team behind Latecomers (which I First AD’ed way back in autumn 2022) — including Madeleine Gottlieb, Liam Heyen, Hannah Ngo, Alistair Baldwin, Angus Thompson & Hannah Diviney — picked up the AACTA for ‘Best Online Drama or Comedy’ last week! I’m unspeakably proud of that series, and if you missed it, watch via SBS. And the stellar crew of The Disposables, screening on ABC, were up for the same award!

• Jack McAvoy won Flickerfest’s ‘Best Cinematography’ award for his nuanced and magical work on The Dancing Girl & the Balloon Man.

• Steve Anthopoulos, Yingna Lu & Liam Heyen (again!) keep racking up wins around the world for superb short film Voice Activated, most recently at Dunedin International Film Festival! Now it’s wrapping up its festival run, watch it online.

Meanwhile, commercial work is picking up as the summer winds down and our patron saint Taylor Swift conquers the east coast. Samuel has finished the grade on his upcoming feature Went Up the Hill, with only a few weeks left in post before the film is well and truly complete… and I’m as eager as anyone else to see it up on the big screen at last!

Favourite Reads of 2023

Here we go — a not-so-succinct list of the books that really moved me, challenged me and stuck with me from last year. They’re from a whole host of genres & formats: fiction, history, memoir, graphic novel, poetry, and more than one that blur those lines and defy easy categorisation. Admittedly only a couple were actually released in 2023 — I’m always a year or two behind new releases (plus I made an effort to read some of the books that were piling up around the house after Samuel broke the unfortunate news that we don’t have space for yet another bookshelf).

‘Dropbear’ by Evelyn Araluen

A rare poetry collection that feels ferociously alive; it’s a sharp mediation on Australian culture and identity that shifts gear from page to page, poem to poem, from tender to reflective to savage, without ever dissolving into abstract word salad. It’s also very, very funny. Araluen saves her very best barbs for white Australian writers who attempt to reduce country to simplistic poetic imagery, and ooooft, noted.

‘Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands’ by Kate Beaton

I knew cartoonist Kate Beaton from her hilarious Hark a Vagrant comic from the early 2010s: tongue-in-cheek panels about history and literature featuring lusty Brontes, gay pirates and heroes behaving badly. So I was not at all prepared for Ducks, her dense and painstaking memoir of working in Canada’s remote oil fields in her early 20s, desperate and saddled with college debt. For a while, Beaton’s charming art style cloaks the air of menace that pervades these remote, male-dominated work camps; like Beaton’s younger self, we’re liable to minimise the culture of harassment, assault and violence until the events are drawn for us in stark black and white. But despite her harrowing personal experiences, Beaton writes with remarkable breadth and generosity, reflecting on the cost of this work, not just to the planet, but to the people who are warped by the industry’s promise of fast money without consequences.

‘Exteriors’ by Annie Ernaux, trans. Tanya Leslie

I picked Exteriors off the display table at Kinokuniya because a) Ernaux had recently won the Nobel Prize, and b) it was the thinnest (i.e. least intimidating) volume there. At 90 pages long, it barely seemed like a book at all. After completing it, I was in a state of awe that it was allowed to be a book. Exteriors is a collection of disjointed journal entries made over the course of the 7 years that Ernaux lived in the town of Cergy-Pontoise, on the outskirts of Paris. They’re frequently no longer than a paragraph, describing faces, places, fleeting interactions and observations, often in transit — on stations, trains, the metro, or in motion through urban spaces. There’s very little “I”, and no narrative; the closest thing to a running thread are her occasional check-ins on the man who collects the shopping trolleys. And yet, like a bird who’s feathered her nest with a hundred gleaming pieces of litter, Ernaux has created a spectacularly vivid whole — a portrait of a time, place and community that has already passed on.

‘Grimmish’ by Michael Winkler

In theory, Grimmish is a historical novel about an Italian-American Boxer with the same superpower in the ring as Homer Simpsons (i.e. he can take extraordinary punishment without ever being knocked down), embarking on his 1908-9 tour of Australia. But that in no way captures how delightfully bonkers and ambitious this book is. In practice, it’s a free-flowing, experimental mediation on violence, pain thresholds and masculinity that’s in constant conversation with its form and function, questioning how we engage with and re-imagine history. There’s even a talking goat! It’s a difficult book to summarise — my best comparison is probably Moby Dick, if the author were obsessed with boxing rather than whales — but absolutely a rewarding read.

‘Harrow the Ninth’ by Tamsyn Muir

The second novel in the Locked Tomb series (i.e. “the books about the lesbian space necromancers”) is my favourite of the trio released thus far — but my god, Tamsyn Muir doesn’t make it easy. She is a maddening writer, who in book after book drops the reader into a new and bewildering mystery, trapped in the POV of a lead character who doesn’t know what the hell is going on (and is usually suffering some form of memory loss or identity breakdown), piling on murders, characters and incongruous flashbacks — all with the implicit, impossible promise that this will eventually make some kind of sense. And then… SHE PULLS IT OFF. Harrow the Ninth should not work, and yet the payoff in the final chapters is so extraordinary that I will forgive Muir anything, and will probably read every book she writes from here until the grave. Plus it helps that the Locked Tomb novels are sexy, fun, hilarious and written with remarkable flair.

‘In the Shadow of the Gods: The Emperor in World History’ by Dominic Lieven

An exploration of the role of emperors across centuries and civilisations, from Ancient Rome to Imperial China to Napoleonic France. Lieven delves into the common traits of successful rulers, laments Alexander the Great’s malign influence on the wannabe Emperor-Heroes that followed him, and weighs up the different approaches to succession taken across the ages, from primogeniture to best-man-wins to elite elections. It made for a great accompaniment to the final season of Succession — even after thousands of years of trying, no one has devised a foolproof method of transferring power from one generation to the next without the empire falling apart. Kendall, Shiv, and Roman are in appropriately awful company.

‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot

Most people reading this newsletter have probably already been subjected to my rants about how George Eliot’s Middlemarch is the greatest novel ever written (it is though). Eliot has an extraordinary ability to capture the messy mix of good intentions, self interest and unacknowledged biases that guide our everyday decisions, and the ripple effect these have on the lives of those around us. Last year I finally tucked into her semi-autobiographical The Mill on the Floss, which follows the irrepressible and brilliant Maggie Tulliver as she struggles with the straightjacket of society’s expectations for a young woman in the 1820s, and whose life veers towards tragedy as her family’s fortunes decline and she gets caught in an illicit love triangle. It’s a study of thwarted dreams and the destructive power of “respectable opinions”, but Eliot’s extraordinary empathy for even the most unsympathetic characters prevents it from becoming a bleak slog. A moment of kindness towards the end of the novel from a completely unexpected source made me tear up more than any other piece of art last year. As always with Eliot, it’s long and imperfect and a little misshapen, but my god it’s a masterpiece.

‘Tell Me I’m Worthless’ by Alison Rumfitt

The friend who gifted me Rumfitt’s debut novel described it as “obscure trans horror all the way from Brighton”, and although I’m not a big horror fan that sounded irresistible. Tell Me I’m Worthless is, at its core, a haunted house story — but one where the haunting in question goes beyond the supernatural, to a sickness in the collective British soul, something vindictive and cruel at the foundations of Albion itself that encourages people to give their worst impulses free reign. It goes to some spectacularly uncomfortable places, particularly for a progressive queer person — every conceivable trigger warning applies. But I’m grateful for how brave, uncompromising and downright scary this is.

‘Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life’ by Anna Funder

Eileen O’Shaughnessy is a vanished woman. Her husband George Orwell scrubbed her from the pages of his books and columns; his biographers routinely downplayed her contribution to Orwell’s work and life; and perhaps worst of all, as Anna Funder demonstrates, Eileen ultimately erased herself. A brilliant literary mind and labour organiser, Eileen stifled her own talents to support Orwell, making herself so small that she died of a preventable illness because she worried she wasn’t worth the expense of the surgery. Wifedom can make you very, very angry, but Funder isn’t here to bury Orwell (her hero, and one of mine too), but to investigate how our art and history systematically erase the women who make them possible. And she attempts to even the score, just a little, by filling in the blanks of Eileen’s magnificent and tragic story with dashes of fiction. It’s a moving, introspective book about domesticity, sacrifice, and the hidden costs of greatness.

‘The Women in Black’ by Madeleine St John

Last of all, a warm hug of a book. The Women in Black conjures Sydney in the 1950s, seen through the eyes of the women who work in the Ladies Frocks Department at David Jones (sorry, I mean F. G. Goode Department Store). It’s a tender and yet profound little book about growing up and growing into yourself, written with a wry, satirical clarity that reminded me a little of Jane Austen (that is, if she ever worked retail). A local classic that deserves more love — skip the subpar adaptations.

And a few other favourites:

• Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin and The King Must Die by Mary Renault are clever re-workings of ancient myths, finding space for reinvention in the gaps.

• Tara Westover’s Educated is a harrowing tumble down the other side of the American looking glass, and fascinating mediation on trauma and memory.

• Conflict is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman is a wise, challenging study of cycles of righteousness and blame (in personal, social and political realms), and gave me new tools for navigating conflict, aiming for resolution rather than punishment.

• Loving the ‘Decadent Editions’ pocketbook series on 2000s cinema, particularly Melissa Anderson on Inland Empire, which makes the provocative argument that the film is an “acteurist” work, where star Laura Dern is as pivotal a creative force as director David Lynch.

And that’s my year in books! I hope there’s a few on this list you might enjoy, and I’d love to hear everyone else’s recent favourites and recommendations.

Film of the Week: Suzhou River (2000)

‘苏州河’ 
Written & Directed by Lou Ye.

A stunning and concise slice of Chinese noir. Suzhou River is a slippery piece of work, combining a familiar tale of love lost and rediscovered — an interpolation of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, right down to its score — with low-rent gangsters, a mermaid, and some thrillingly subjective filmmaking. Zhou Xun is bewitching in her dual roles as Moudan and Meimei… or are they the same girl?

A huge chunk of Suzhou River is told in first-person, with the camera acting as our protagonist’s eyes, and I honestly can’t think of a film that has used the technique so damn well. The likes of De Palma and Carpenter love POV camerawork for scenes of horror or voyeurism, but more sustained attempts usually end up as dull as Lady in the Lake (1946), with actors struggling to deliver exposition directly down the lens. Not Lou Ye; his camera is never static, always roving, and he uses the confusion first-person stirs up to keep us off balance. Because our protagonist is a down-on-his-luck videographer, it’s never quite clear if a scene is a memory or footage… and when Lou Ye shifts into more conventional coverage for a story-within-a-story, the line between truth, fantasy and desire only get blurrier.

The roving camera is also a perfect fit for a film fascinated by people on the fringes of a rapidly transforming city. Our gaze flits across the run-down barges, seedy clubs, and abandoned warehouses with the eyes of an indifferent resident, giving us access to a fog-shrouded Shanghai that’s fast fading from view two decades later. Virtuosic and intoxicating.

Available to watch on MUBI (Australia) and Criterion Channel (USA).

Odds and Ends

• It’s still film festival season in Sydney! The Chinese & Antenna festivals have wrapped up, but Europa! Europa and Mardi Gras still have a weeks to run. I’m excited to check out Femme, Housekeeping for Beginners and The Missing at Mardi Gras, and the Yogos Retrospective at The Ritz.

• New pair of interlinked short stories from the wonderful Brandon Taylor (Real Life) recently dropped: Stalin, Lenin, Robespierre and Warehouses.

• If you love old Hollywood, there are few greater joys than watching Katharine Hepburn hold court, and her impromptu, 2+ hour interview with Dick Cavett in 1973 sees the queen at her imperious best. A treasure.

That’s it for this week, thanks for reading! Next time I’ll be tallying up my favourite films of 2023, and sharing a few thoughts on revisiting Russian literature. If you want any more of my movie lists and hot takes, follow me on Letterboxd.