Hunt Angels
Maltings cinema
Wednesday 26 21.00
Australia, 2006, 85 min
Black & white and colour, 35mm
English
Sugg. cert. 15
dir/scr: Alec Morgan
prod: Sue Maslin
dop: Jackie Farkas
editor: Tony Stevens
sound: Andrew Plain
music: Jen Anderson
cast: Ben Mendelsohn, Victoria Hill, Eloise
Oxer, Robert Bruning, Julie Herbert
production company: Film Art Doco in
association with Blusteal Films
international sales: Fortissimo Films
Director’s profile:
Alec Morgan is one of Australia’s most experienced documentary filmmakers. His credits include the multi-award-winning Lousy Little Sixpence (1983), a seminal film that exposed the taking of Aboriginal children from their families, Admission Impossible (1992), an investigation into the controversial White Australia immigration policies, and The End of the Earth (1990), winner of the Gold Medal for Best Environmental Film at the 1990 New York Film Festival. He was Creative Head of the Australian network television series Our Century (1999) and a co-producer of The Secret Country (1988), a series that uncovered Australia’s hidden history. Hunt Angels is his first feature film.
(A glance at Alec Morgan’s filmography also brings up a one-off stint, in 1984, as an extra on the set of The Parole Officer director John Duigan’s One Night Stand, as a … Scottish piper, of course.)
Director’s filmography:
2006 Hunt Angels
1992 Admission Impossible
1990 The End of the Earth (TV)
1983 Lousy Little Sixpence
While conducting research for a television series, documentary director Alec Morgan came across a 1938 newsreel that startled him. This was the first ‘true crime’ piece ever made in Australia, which recreated the unsolved murder of a young pyjama-clad woman whom the police had not yet been able to identify. It was much riskier and zanier than anything else being made at the time, and spurred Morgan to find out more about who had made the film … What he uncovered was a maverick (and adulterous) couple with an unconventional attitude towards fundraising, who would stop at nothing to get their films made.
There are echoes of Tim Burton’s Ed Wood in this celebration of Rupert Kathner and Alma Brooks: overlooked by film historians, they were part of a forgotten period in Australian cinema, a time when the domestic film industry was being strangled by Hollywood studios (who bought up all Australian productions to force them off the screen). In this context, their single-minded determination would seem all the more admirable – even if they displayed more of a talent for conning gangsters, the public and the police than for making good films.
To bring Rupert and Alma’s story to life, Alec Morgan has chosen an aptly unconventional mixture of documentary and fiction techniques. With the help of digital compositing, actors playing the real-life lead characters are inserted into montage sequences combining archive newsreels and animated black and white photographs of 1930s Sydney. The result is a playful, visually arresting and fiercely original film – as exciting, but far better than anything Kathner and Brooks ever made.