Masters project wins AFI Awards
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Actor Ben Mendelsohn as Rupert Kathner in Hunt Angels |
A film which was developed as part of a Macquarie University Masters degree has gone on win three Australian Film Institute (AFI) Awards and was praised by a leading film critic as being one of the best Australian films of 2006.
Hunt Angels, which was written and directed by Macquarie University media lecturer Alec Morgan, received awards for Best Documentary, Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects at the 2006 AFIs.
The film was praised as one of the best Australian films of last year and awarded four stars by critic David Stratton on his television program At the Movies. It also won the Australian Film Critics Circle Award for Best Australian Feature Documentary 2006 and the ATOM (Australian Teachers of the Media Award) for Best Documentary.
A Bonnie and Clyde adventure
Hunt Angels tells the previously untold true story of a 1930s maverick film-maker and his partner in crime who conned people, broke laws and sweet-talked judges all in the name of making movies.
The Bonnie and Clyde adventure follows Rupert Kathner, played by Ben Mendelsohn, and Alma Brooks, played by Victoria Hill, on a movie-making spree that not only took on the Hollywood barons who controlled what was shown in Australian cinemas at that time, but also a Police Commissioner determined to keep crime out of the news and the audacious rogue film-makers off the streets.
Talent rediscovered
Inspite of their legendary escapades and the important part they played in Australia's film-making history, Kathner and Brooks have somehow escaped the history books. In fact Morgan, also an archival specialist, only first became aware of them seven years ago when he was hunting through archival footage whilst working at Channel Nine.
"While working on a program at Nine I discovered a short film by Kathner and Brooks called the Pyjama Girl Murder Case which was Australia's first true crime movie," he explains. "I couldn't find anything about the film-makers in the history books so I decided to speak with some of the people who knew them and their stories were quite amazing, funny and fascinating. Kathner was kind of a legend to a lot of the film-makers who worked in that period, mainly because he and Brooks used all means possible to get their films made. They made 19 film items including four features and Kathner kept going until he died at the age of 50."
Making Hunt Angels
The film, shot in black-and-white and using archival footage and digitised photographs from the era, chronicles the couple's attempts to get their films seen by people all around the world.
"I decided to use archival footage for authenticity because the story of Kathner and Brooks is quite unbelievable and using the photographs allowed us to recreate Sydney exactly as it was in the 1930s and 40s," says Morgan. "Actors were layered into the photographs so it looks like they are actually walking through the city. We had to invent a whole new digital system to make the film which is actually the first of its kind in the world. You can get into a real mess with digital technology unless you have lots of money to throw at a film, which we didn't, so we had to create a totally new way of doing things."
The film was screened at the prestigious Rotterdam Film Festival in January and will open The Sydney Touring Film Festival in Darwin and Alice Springs in February. There is also interest from the Sundance Festival.
Hunt Angels will be available on DVD in February.
For further information contact Alec Morgan alec.morgan@mq.edu.au or visit www.huntangels.com.au/huntangels/