“As an outsider, I could see that Lightning Ridge is a refuge for misfits,” says Russian-born Australian film-maker Alena Lodkina. “What that meant, of course, was leaving things behind. Lots of people in Lightning Ridge have stories of broken relationships and criminal pasts, or all kinds of paths that have led to that place.”
As a film about outsiders, it’s fitting that Strange Colours is enjoying a deeply unconventional path to success. The movie announces its writer and director as an audacious new voice in Australian cinema, but it was made with support from beyond our shores. It doesn’t begin with the logo of the federal film-funding agency Screen Australia – and it was viewers and critics overseas who saw and loved it first.
Strange Colours grew from a short, brilliant documentary whose subjects’ okker accents are so thick they needed subtitles. It is not a zombie, horror, killer creature or dystopian romp set in the outback, as per the last decade’s cascade of local genre films emulating the success of Wolf Creek. Instead, it’s an ultra-low-budget, hyper-distilled story of dreamers, drinkers and drifters stuck in a remote community, in which Lodkina herself says “nothing much happens” at all.
The film casts an interloper’s eye on life in Lightning Ridge, a town of 2284 people (according to the 2016 Census) which is known as the “black opal capital of the world”. Lying deep in northern New South Wales, with a 23% Indigenous population, it has gathered a potent national mythology as a place of big money from occasional gem-field wins, but also a place of dashed hopes and lots of heartache. The boom is long-over, but many lonely ageing migrant workers remain, living on shacks above almost-exhausted mine shafts. It is this demographic that Lodkina casts her eye upon.
In the film we follow Milena, an opaque and watchful psychology student (Kate Cheel, in a performance of great stillness and charisma). She hops off a coach to find her terminally ill dad, one of many locals who live in hope of a huge rush of gems (Daniel P Jones, the ex-convict-turned-riveting star of Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s 2011 film Hail). While father and daughter struggle to overcome estrangement, his mining lease is disrupted by a mysterious thief.
Strange Colours isn’t big on plot; it’s more about the feeling of this strange place, and the wandering souls who populate it. The landscape is captured so strikingly it often looks as if it has been shot on the moon. Even the film’s coming-of-age theme is unpinned, pointing only to the kinds of familial breakages that must be accepted rather than overcome.
After its Venice film festival premiere – itself a major marker of prestige for an independent Australian film – one US critic described it a “startling kind of phenomenological character study,” while Australia’s FilmInk praised its “assured film with a clear directorial eye and robust performances” that “[captures] the melancholy and loneliness of outback isolation.” Critic Jason Di Rosso has called it the best-directed Australian feature of last year, and last month it was named best Australian independent film at the Gold Coast film festival. All ahead of its theatrical release.
A self-described nomad, Lodkina moved from Russia to Sydney with her family at age 13, and now lives in Melbourne. It was her parents who told her about Lightning Ridge, having taken a road trip years ago. “This place really stuck with them. They took all these pictures and and said, ‘you know, it would be a great place for a cinematic thing.’”
“A few years later, I got on a bus and just went,” she says. “I went on the Couchsurfing website and there was one person listed in the whole of Lightning Ridge. He turned out to be this generous, kind soul, who was really well-respected in the community for being a good person. He introduced me to all these people – and I’ve never been anywhere like that. I’ve never met people like that.”
Eventually she found the plot, which mirrored her own experiences of going around, talking trash with locals, listening to them, drinking morning VBs. “I haven’t seen my son or my daughter in 20 years,” people would say to Lodkina, about their down-and-out lives pursuing ever-scarcer riches in the infamously alcohol-drenched, geographically sequestered, post-industrial township. “I had a broken relationship and she took the kids away.”
A narrative emerged, built from the memories and unhealed wounds of those who had left their old lives behind for a new one in Lightning Ridge: a young woman visiting her dying father among these “macho, raggy, rough guys”, with their past breaking open around them. “That [idea of the] grand three-act plot feels generic and patriarchal,” she says. “It’s inspiring when film-makers are able to connect to the bigger world beyond the film-making machine.”
If the film sounds like a breath of fresh air, it may be because it hasn’t emerged from this country’s usual film-making structures. Lodkina’s short documentary played at festivals around the world, and she edited Courtin-Wilson’s lucid, sublime art film The Silent Eye (2016), arriving as one of a young group of film-makers making work outside the mainstream. But without credits in directing or producing feature films, Lodkina says that her team didn’t approach Screen Australia for support. “We knew we’d be turned back,” she says. “Two years ago, if you were a young film-maker who hadn’t made anything, you weren’t eligible.” (Screen Australia recently removed the barriers to film-makers without prior credits.)
In fact, that lack of local support became a windfall. The project was accepted into the Venice Biennale College Cinema, an esteemed low-budget program that selects three brilliant young artists from outside Italy each year. As the first Australian in the program in its six years – collaborating with producer Kate Laurie and co-writer and producer Isaac Wall – Lodkina found she could look at Australia and Lightning Ridge with an outsider’s eye.
Despite its uniqueness, it’s hard not to see Lightning Ridge as a microcosm for Australia – a country whose population is now half comprised of first- or second- generation migrants; a country which is reliant on removing dwindling resources from the earth, and yet is almost entirely disconnected from the ecological and emotional dimensions of that earth.
“People I spoke to would always talk about how much they dislike the city and were tired of that lifestyle,” Lodkina says, of her time in the outback. “Even though they’re mining and trying to make money, they still are in reaction to urban capitalism.” The film became “a meditation on people seeking a place outside of these really tough structures that are kind of unwelcoming to humans, and that impulse of wanting to escape.”
Next Lodkina is working on a floating script for a film called Petrol, which she describes as “a sort of romantic narrative centred around a friendship between two women in Melbourne,” while pursuing a documentary project shot in the city of her childhood, St Petersburg.
In the meantime, we have Strange Colours: a film with a unique perspective, made by a young woman standing outside the standard film-making system, looking back in.