Shooting Charlie’s Country. Image from Vertigo Productions.
Australian films offered three different kinds of auteur experiences this year. Charlie’s Country is a modest, precise, funny and disturbing picture that evolves from the relationship between David Gulpilil and Rolf de Heer, with Peter Djigarr in attendance and a crew inspired once again by the alchemy. As we know in Australia, this contemporary film mirrors Gulpilil’s own experience of life, though the characters are different. The key moment in which Charlie’s hair is cut, turning him from free black man sustained by small things and his sense of humour to a prisoner confronting his own life as a victim, is an extraordinary fragment of our cultural history.
