ScreenWize

Whilst the judges were deliberating about the winners at this year’s Tropfest finals, John Polson – Tropfest’s founder and Creative Director - screened an extract from the first feature film to be produced under the Tropfest banner. It was a beautiful scene of two boys – one aboriginal and one white - setting up a boxing ring in a wheat field. This was a preview of September, written and directed by Peter Carstairs, who was then interviewed live in front of the 150,000 audience. He looked less than comfortable with the attention, and talked nervously about some the challenges he was going through with his first feature.

Ten months later, September is in commercial release after an international premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, and has just been accepted to screen at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival. Carstairs is much more relaxed talking about the film now. “We’re ecstatic about getting into Berlin, and the film is getting a lot of attention with European and particularly French audiences.” But Carstairs still remembers opening night jitters. “Sitting in an audience for the first time in Vancouver was terrifying,” he says. “Who knows what the audience is going to think. But I would occasionally look around and they seemed to enjoy it. Then what was great was that they all stayed for the Q&A session. I think the Canadians really understood the film because they have similar kinds of issues and they have a huge wheat belt.”

The film is set in rural Western Australia in 1968 and tells the story of a friendship between two boys growing up on a farm at a time when Aboriginal labourers worked only for food and board. When new laws were passed ensuring that Aboriginals were to be paid a wage, many were turned off the land, and it’s this little talked about recent history that Carstairs wanted to acknowledge in the film. “I grew up in Western Australia and I remember when I was a kid noticing these small camps by the side of the road, full of indigenous people”, he says. “I didn’t know what was going on, and it wasn’t until much later that I heard about the introduction of the wage laws and their impact. When the laws came out, most white farmers decided they would rather hire white workers, and many Aboriginals were forced to leave. It was a difficult milestone in Aboriginal history.”

Trained as a lawyer, Carstairs graduated from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) in 2001. “I’ve always loved cinema and I never thought about leaving the law behind,” he says, “but when the opportunity presented itself to spend two years with other people making films, I couldn’t say no.”

After graduating, Carstairs made a short film for Tropfest called Pacific, which resulted in a slot in the Tropfest finals in 2006. It is an usual Tropfest film, shot on 35mm rather than digital video, with a sparse narrative and a gentle pace. Whilst it may not have been the usual comedy crowd pleaser, it brought him to the attention of John Polson who launched the Tropfest Feature Program the same year. Carstairs had every filmmakers dream-come-true: to be given a million dollars to make a first feature film.

“It’s significantly different making a feature,” he says. “It’s so logistically terrifying and I had to let go of control a lot, that’s what I learnt. Some days I would just have to turn up on set and go with what was happening. It was a machine. Before September, the longest shoot I had done was three days with a small budget and a small crew. We shot September in 25 days and that’s pretty quick, especially for me. I am a particularly slow director because I like to deliberate and make sure that I have options when I get to the editing room.”

The deliberation is evident on the screen, and September is filled with long, carefully constructed imagery, and a narrative pace similar to Pacific. “I have become a more mature and introspective filmmaker,” says Carstairs, “and I am now very interested in making the kinds of films that communicate not through words but through subtext, image and use of montage. This was what we did with Pacific, and it was a kind of experiment, a successful one, that communicates to the audience. September is a feature made in that tradition, like many French films, that acknowledges that audiences are incredibly sophisticated beings and don’t need to be told everything.”

Filed Under: Interviews by Simon