'Australia's expatriate filmmakers are an investment waiting to be realised, writes Storry Walton in a wide-ranging examination of the Australian feature film industry. They leave because they need to. Here is "not an environment conducive to making a decent living. It is easy to conclude that the Australian cinema is borne along by faith and oily rags". Now these expatriates could change all that. "Are we incapable of an angry cinema, an ecstatic cinema, a cinema of revelation, of political and social outrage, of the heroic and the epic?" He argues cogently for a government-funded expatriate-return strategy to benefit both the filmmaker and the home industry. A way to "turn the notion of the homeland upside down, no longer a place of the past but a place of renewal". With this extra strength, he says, we could do some brave things. Walton praises government's three-tier funding structure for film development and sees a dynamic future in the
Film Finance Corporation's radical new policy of quality evaluation. Modestly-funded movies with character and depth. And filmmakers endorse him. "From the outside, with clear vision, I could see how many good things there were - good writers, good actors, top crews, tremendous government support," says
Gillian Armstrong.
Phillip Noyce believes that Australia is the best place in the world to secure script development support. "I never had so much joy as I had with
Rabbit-Proof Fence."'
Source: Libraries Australia
