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Author Jason Di Rosso

Jason di rosso.

Jason Di Rosso is a film critic at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and host of the weekly radio show The Final Cut . He is currently completing a Doctorate of Creative Arts in the School of Communication, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney.

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The Chamber Films of Matías Piñeiro: Complexity and Intertextuality in Micro-Budget Filmmaking

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The Hidden Spring

Where to watch

The hidden spring.

2023 Directed by Jason Di Rosso

Divided by 4000 kilometres, a son and his dying father connect in this profoundly intimate documentary debut.

Director Director

Jason Di Rosso

Producer Producer

Writer writer, editor editor, cinematography cinematography.

Documentary

Releases by Date

08 aug 2023, releases by country.

  • Premiere Melbourne International Film Festival

51 mins   More at TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Felix Hubble

Review by Felix Hubble ★★★★

Based Chad Di Rosso delivers a cinematic knock out!!

(fr... extremely solid, interesting and intimate film - fantastic in a cinema, and love Dimitri Zaunder's grade; v excellent to see someone local grapple with global essay cinema, but especially the work of two of our GOATs, Jeni Thornley and Margot Nash (name dropped by Di Rosso in his intro tonight and also screening very accomplished new works at MIFF - had a couple of flashbacks to The Silences hanging out watching this, with some very excellent and worthwhile digressions), making something that's also very much his own thing, that I found particularly strong when grappling with the loss of aspects of cultural identity. Unironically a banger and very funny that the sole musical work featured in the film - to great effect at its top and tail - is just something found online that worked.)

Shea

Review by Shea

Di Rosso conjures up so much from so little - evocations of distance and absence thru what the camera rests on and what it doesn’t. A film that feels as though it is searching for itself, slowly piecing together a bigger picture one chance moment at a time. The notion of architecture as memory is fascinating and I found the suggestion that a house is like a camera (a quote from whom I can't recall) to be deeply resonant with what Di Rosso attempts here in the humble domestic set-ups. Also a surprising focus on planes, trains and automobiles and the landscapes they traverse.

Honestly it's a privilege just to see something this intimate in a theatre. Nothing but good and generous thoughts from Jason Di Rosso after the screening, made all the more special by his various musings to me on Adelaide later throughout the day.

Daniel

Review by Daniel

Always going to be up for this kind of handmade semi-experimental work but even accounting for that pre-existing predilection I think this is something really special. Di Rosso strikes a perfect balance between formal looseness and rigour, allowing conscious connections and unconscious feeling to flow through the film with equal weight. Geography as emotion (and vice versa) is one of my favourite motifs in art and The Hidden Spring is as potent an example I've seen recently. The distances - Sydney and Perth, word and image, thought and expression, father and son - are so much larger than the things they connect and disconnect that they almost start to mean more than the things themselves. Finding peace in those empty spaces is probably impossible, life itself.

Ashlea💧🦎🐜

Review by Ashlea💧🦎🐜 ★★★★

Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have

With my father over in WA, this film was bound to stir emotions in me, and it did. I liked Jason Di Rosso's stylistic choices; I hope he can trust his artistic sensibility moving forward (he was hopeful his choice of music resonated in the Q & A). The score was particularly well suited to the subject. It's an odd feeling when your father is complicated and hard to break through yet still adored by you. Yes, you could feel the distance between the two, but also the underlying, unspoken bond of love. Jason narrated the film and briefly touched on fear when it comes to sick loved ones;…

Flynn Boffo

Review by Flynn Boffo ★★★★

I really connected to this one, in ways I never thought I would.

C L

Review by C L ★★

Crafting an artsy documentary that delves into the life of a seemingly distant and now deceased father, while omitting any tangible interactions with the said father, carries distinct consequences. The resultant documentary assumes the form of a unilateral narrative, founded predominantly on the director's abundant verbal commentary and meticulously selected visual elements. While proponents might contend that the documentary serves as an intimate portrayal of the director's personal perspective regarding his departed father, I am inclined to perceive the documentary's structural approach as one that inadvertently marginalizes the father's presence. Throughout the documentary, the father remains an elusive entity, his portrayal invariably shaped by the director's subjective narrations that mirror his own emotions and sentiments toward his progenitor. The conspicuous…

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jason di rosso movie reviews

Film in Revolt

A platform for youth to explore film

Interview with Jason Di Rosso / The Hidden Spring

by Flynn Boffo

Radio National’s ‘The Screen Show’ and its host, Jason Di Rosso was my introduction to film criticism. With his weekly show, my eyes were opened to the wider world of international cinema. Consequently, Jason played an important role in the path that has led me to this moment where you are reading my writing. Upon discovering that he was releasing a film of his own this year, I felt compelled to reach out.

The Hidden Spring is an essay film, exploring both the physical and spiritual distance between a terminally ill father and his son. It is the distance itself that Di Rosso candidly frames, reflecting on his father in Perth as he observes life changes around him in Sydney.

One thing that struck me about The Hidden Spring was its sense of reflection, filmed mostly within Jason’s inner west home. The familiar sounds of planes and trains are never far away, this motif of transport and the tracks connecting destinations are deeply embedded into Jason’s immigrant background.

Flynn Boffo: I am interested in learning more about the moment when you felt motivated to actually pick up a camera and start filming this.

Jason Di Rosso: It was just so intuitive, I was experiencing this initial shock and feeling of grief, anticipating my father’s decline. I was also doing a research doctorate at UTS, part of which was going to be some kind of film, and I had to in some way trust intuition and see what was going to emerge.

So that’s how the film really emerged. I started to get a sense that there’s a potential language here that will work for a film dealing with these themes, like the motif of looking out the window, but also like the diaristic kind of shots of the dinner table. It just sort of emerged in that way, but it was very ad hoc.

FB: I really connected with the idea of making art in a reaction, to grief, in reaction to something happening in your life that’s out of your control. I found a lot of comfort in the idea that your world might be changing rapidly, but the camera’s in your hands and you’re framing it right now.

I found that really interesting, as a film critic and a filmmaker, how you’ve used cinema to make sense of your world during this time.

JDR: Yes, there’s a therapeutic aspect to making this film and also picking up a camera, shooting images, and recording sound. In the digital age, where cameras come with microphones, you can’t help but think of images in connection with sound. There’s such a drama to the sound of living on a railway. And that’s both the trains going past, but also the extraordinary sounds of the maintenance crews at night, that stuff sounds crazy. It’s almost science fiction. The sounds are made with metal under tension.

JDR: That’s true too. I think there’s a sense of transience in the film, a sense of people in motion. There’s a tension within the film for people to reflect on, deep in the film, a sense of uprootedness within my family history that in some way I’m still part of because I’ve left Perth.

There’s been no sort of arriving at the destination for me in a sense. The film was at least trying to suggest that there’s still that momentum from almost three generations ago that began with my great-grandparents, which I don’t mention in the film.

These are things that emerge almost after you’ve made the film, there’s this theme of work and labor, and I think there’s a tension there between the labor of maintaining things and upkeep, which goes into the idea of dwelling that people like Heidegger talk about, where to dwell in a place is to meaningfully engage with it, cultivate it, and maintain it in some way.

So the labor outside of the workers on the railway is that kind of labor.  I was drawn to that, apart from the fact that visually I thought it was interesting, they also seem to come from another realm.

During COVID, all the hidden labor was suddenly noticeable and I thought that sort of labor of maintenance was a really important theme in my film. And, it’s in a dialogue with another kind of labor which isn’t about maintaining. It’s about breaking ground and building the first thing somewhere. And it’s a disruptive, penetrating sort of labor.

FB: I was quite surprised that you didn’t start it during the lockdown. Watching the film even from the first shots, you beautifully photographed the space and it was cool seeing you take this moment to really reflect on your environment as many of us were later forced to during the lockdown.

JDR: Yeah. It’s funny because the lockdown ended up being a period of collective grieving. When COVID happened, we left the world behind and we weren’t really sure if we were going to get back to that world at all.

All of that was happening, so there is a double grief in the film in that sense. It just so happened that the expression of the grief that I was sort of feeling with my dad being ill was already evoking that reflection and it was evoking a kind of visual language that was locked down but it was very inspired by a film, I mean there are a few films that based their visual language around the motif of looking out windows.

But, one of the most influential on me was Ackermann’s Là-bas ( Down There ), a film she made when she was teaching at university in Tel Aviv. Almost exclusively of shots looking out the window of the rental apartment she had in Tel Aviv at her neighbor’s with a room and a voiceover.

FB: It’s interesting you mention that, because for me it feels very evocative of the films of Agnes Varda, particularly L’opéra-mouffe ( Diary of a Pregnant Woman ) which she made when she was pregnant and is told from her perspective looking down at the markets from her window.

JDR: I was very interested in this notion of just looking out at the world. You’re never really sure until you make the film, what you’ve got. But I thought out the window I had a few layers that were going to be aesthetically interesting enough to photograph and to use as a motif again and again, a photographic motif.

FB: To see all of these symbols that you were surrounded with,  you did a really great job at finding the connections to your father. You’ve got the train tracks, you’ve got the fact that your house is being renovated during this time. It was interesting, almost like you were taking off the shell of your house. You find yourself in this grief and your kitchen is being torn down.

JDR: There is this notion of the layers of history that I was reflecting on with my father and then my family more generally, and then these literal layers that are being ripped off the wall, you know, walls in my house. And I also thought there’s something, given that it’s a film about someone who you don’t really see and a situation that’s central but you don’t really see, which is an illness and its treatments and all of that.

I was just trying to find some kind of language that on a symbolic level, or even just the subconscious emotional level, could, speak to that and articulate those feelings and that situation.

JDR: The film does have quite a reticence about it though. There aren’t these full frontal shots of me or my family or close-ups. People are often shot in shadows and so forth.That renders everything less, it takes things out of realism a bit and elevates them to a kind of archetypal level.

But also with this film, if I put too much detail in, it would almost become a little bit more banal. I wanted things to be sometimes just reduced to figures, like my mother for example.

FB: I see that in the scene where she is directing you.

JDR: Yes. Off camera.

There’s a sort of filmmaker that’s very much about full disclosure and throwing the audience into a kind of self-interrogation. In this film, I was always conscious of playing with the tension between that approach and something that kept a distance.

FB: Interesting that you say it like that, you’ve mentioned that Ackerman film where a lot of it is looking out windows, and for me the impression I got is that it felt like it was made from the first person looking out at their environment.

JDR: The subjectivity was really important as well and in that because it is an essay film. The essay was a form of self-expression, which was more about documenting your attempt to describe the world and your relationship to it, rather than definitively writing about how the world is.

That idea was attractive to me because of the fragmentary nature of the shooting of the film, and also because of the limitations on doing something realistic. I wasn’t in Perth, I wasn’t going to do a fly-on-the-wall thing about my dad being sick, and neither would I really, because it’s not my sensibility, it’s too far away.

The essay form freed me up to express myself in fragments cinematically and to take detours into different registers, registers that were dreamlike and even to be a little meta and talk about the making of the film itself and films I perhaps thought of making but didn’t make.

The film was always going to be in motion and never settled in what it was and that resonated really well with the themes of migration, uprootedness, identity, and being Australian that I wanted to explore in the film.

FB: I felt a strong sense of place in this film, it’s cool to see another entry into that small canon of Inner West-based cinema.

JDR: Often I feel like there’s not a love of place in Australian films, oddly. There’s this sort of disconnect from place, which people will say has its root in non-Indigenous filmmakers not feeling comfortable here. That’s one way of describing it, and it’s an important critique, but whatever the case, I don’t believe that’s the only way to look at it.

I love the places I live in, and there are things I really love about them, and that’s kind of what I wanted to imbue my film with.

FB: Do you think Australian cinema is scared to embrace place as part of the film? It’s almost like they make a film in spite of the place.

JDR: Australian cinema, growing up, wasn’t something I associated with a love of place. Not like American cinema, which is filled with the love of everything from tenement blocks, in New York, to great ancient forests, to the Mojave Desert.

The place is so central in American cinema, and there’s a love of it, just in the way It’s photographed even if there are criticisms of who was there before and the power dynamics in the place. That’s still there, but there’s also just a love for the physicality of being in America.

That’s what I wanted my film to be like. I wanted to make this film that had an aesthetic beauty to it that just sort of luxuriated in a certain hour of the day as the light fades, the way that trains pass by my house, the desert out of the airplane window, and, just the spaces in the film, the architectural spaces.

FB: Entirely, I can really see that and it was really cool to be able to identify that spot in Newtown, that road along the train line.

JDR: I like that too. I love watching films and going, oh, okay, I know where that is, or I’ve been there and to see it presented through a lens, and a filmmaker’s eye just sort of does something different to it.

It’s like seeing a painting of a street, and you revisit the street. And you go, wow. It’s kind of not immortalized, but it’s kind of immortalized, for want of a better word, in the art.

I really like that loving connection because you usually don’t put a lens on something you hate. Usually, there’s something in it. Even if you don’t think it’s beautiful, what you like is maybe the beauty of the tension you see within it. I just wanted the film to be a bit of an embrace.

The Hidden Spring is playing at the Adelaide Film Festival this weekend.

Tickets are available here: https://adelaidefilmfestival.org/event/the-hidden-spring/

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From Wolf Creek to The Royal Hotel: Why the Australian outback is so terrifying

jason di rosso movie reviews

Chilling new film The Royal Hotel tells the story of two female backpackers threatened by men in an outback town. It's just the latest work to depict menace in rural Australia, writes Dan Slevin.

Horror movies derive much of their atmosphere and effectiveness from their locations. Imagine The Wicker Man in the garden of an English country house instead of an isolated Hebridean island. Or The Shining, if it had been set in a sunny hotel on Venice Beach rather than a snowed-in resort in the Rocky Mountains.

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But no location has proved more effective at regularly scaring audiences over the last 50 years than that most remote of locales, the Australian outback.

Its isolation from civilisation looms large in the acclaimed new horror/thriller The Royal Hotel, from The Assistant director Kitty Green – just as it did in the documentary that inspired it, Pete Gleeson's tense-as-hell fly-on-the-wall 2016 work Hotel Coolgardie.

Universal The Royal Hotel is inspired by a documentary that observed two female backpackers working in an outback bar (Credit: Universal)

In both films, a pair of tourists are down on their uppers and take temporary bar work in a small outback town that’s living off the fumes of the Australian mining boom.

There, they have to deal with boorish male locals, who don't seem to realise how threatening their behaviour to the visitors is – it's all just drunken banter to them until it gets out of hand. The potential for violence haunts Hotel Coolgardie – audiences know that the only person who could protect these women if a situation goes bad is the cameraman – but it comes to a head in The Royal Hotel. "Green sets her focus solely on how this violence, which can manifest physically, emotionally, and psychologically, affects the well-being of young women,” said critic Marya E Gates in her review of the film for RogerEbert.com.

With no transport of their own, the women are trapped with these men, and the impossibility of escape is what’s terrifying.

They could walk out. But where to? Into the empty and inhospitable outback. Which direction would you take when the landscape in every direction looks the same?

Where 'outback horror' all began

The Royal Hotel is part of a long Australian tradition of "outback horror", even as Green has talked about setting out to subvert some of the genre's tropes. Just over 50 years ago, it took two international directors to really show audiences the darker side of the Australian outback for the first time. Before 1971, it had been portrayed as relatively benign, the epitome of essential Australianness and the source of the national character – inhabited by happy-go-lucky bushrangers, capable and adaptable easy-going "diggers" – aka army veterans who lived and worked on the land – and loveable larrikin rogues with a healthy distaste for authority. The landscape lent itself to Australian-style westerns (1946's The Overlanders), colonial histories (1949's Eureka Stockade) or rural melodramas like The Sundowners (1960).

But in 1971, the outback ceased to be simply a location: it became a character in its own right.

Englishman Nicholas Roeg arrived in cinemas with Walkabout, which centred on two lost white children, left to die in the heart of the bush, the arid landscape utterly inconsistent with survival, until an Aboriginal youth turns up to guide them to safety.

Getty Images One of the inspirations for The Royal Hotel was cult 1971 thriller Wake in Fright (Credit: Getty Images)

There's a lot more to Walkabout than that, of course, but it was notably the first film to portray the outback itself as hostile to life, to be treated with care, to be taken seriously

In the same year, cult psychological horror classic Wake in Fright (another inspiration for Green in making The Royal Hotel) saw Canadian director Ted Kotcheff – later to find fame with Stallone's First Blood – strand a middle-class teacher in the fictional outback town of Bundanyabba.

When his strategy to gamble his way to the funds needed to pay off his debts fails spectacularly, John Grant (Gary Bond) quickly discovers that the locals are not friendly. His unwilling sojourn in "The Yabba" descends into a desperate nightmare of alcohol abuse and mental torment, as the remoteness of the town, the brutal landscape and the inhospitable people conspire to drive Grant mad.

Initially, at least, the film was not popular in Australia – box office and reviews were both disappointing – but its reputation has grown significantly since it was restored in 2009.

Nevertheless in the 1970s, the floodgates were opening. Young Australians began making films about – and not just in – Australia. A "New Wave", they called it. And for several decades since then, outback Australia has been the canvas for many of those films – disturbing, unnerving, sometimes terrifying. Occasionally, just plain weird. A lot of them also fall under the banner of "Ozploitation" – referring to the out-there exploitation films that really peaked in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s.

One such Ozploitation movie was Peter Weir's early comedy/horror The Cars That Ate Paris (1974). It told the bizarre and twisted story of an outback town whose townspeople deliberately cause fatal motor accidents in order to repurpose the vehicles into wild pre-punk (and pre-Mad Max) stylised four-wheeled creations.

Weir then followed that up in 1975 with the more quietly creepy Picnic at Hanging Rock (based on a 1967 novel), about the disappearance of a group of Victorian schoolgirls in which the outback landscape seemed to be the source of the unsolved mystery itself.

Since then, the Australian outback has been used countless times as a location for either horror, thriller or supernatural mystery stories – sometimes all three. So why does the outback continue to have such a hold over filmmakers?

A place of multiple threats

It starts with extremes, according to Jason Di Rosso, the film critic for Australia's ABC network: "It's all relative, but to non-indigenous Australians, and perhaps more so to non-Australians, it's viewed as a location of extreme heat, extreme distances, extreme isolation, so it's not surprising when filmmakers create characters who are either overwhelmed by it, like in Walkabout, or who become somehow perverted and embittered by it, like many of the townspeople in Wake in Fright, or worse."

Getty Images Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout (1971) saw two children stranded in the outback – and highlighted the landscape's brutality (Credit: Getty Images)

New Zealand Filmmaker and commentator Doug Dillaman has a theory: "Survival is a fundamental goal of a horror narrative and the outback itself provides challenges to survival galore. Isolation from civilisation and its comforts and norms, heat, lack of water, all challenge any visitors. Add to that epic distances and indistinguishable landscapes and surviving on its own is terrifying."

There is also a variety of "outback horror" that has focused on the threat to backpackers specifically, from The Royal Hotel to 1981's Road Games, starring scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis as a US traveller kidnapped by a serial killer, and Greg McLean's 2005 slasher Wolf Creek, where a man tries to murder three travellers whose car breaks down on a remote road in northern Western Australia. The latter had a chilling real-life inspiration – the case of Ivan Milat, who between 1989 and 1993 murdered seven backpackers in rural New South Wales.

So, there are often two things trying to get you in the outback – the land and the people. But sometimes the natural world comes after you, too.

In Russell Mulcahy's fairly demented B-movie 1984 classic Razorback, a giant boar terrorises a town, payback for the illegal conversion of native wildlife into pet food. Mulcahy channels Spielberg – a good role model – with night-time lighting effects that remind you of ET and Close Encounters, and the tactic of hiding the snouted antagonist from the camera for as long as possible.

Nature as a whole takes its revenge on a bickering couple in Colin Eggleston's 1978 thriller Long Weekend. On their way to a remote campground to try and save their marriage, the pair treat the natural world with pretty much continuous self-centred disrespect – a discarded cigarette starts a fire, they hit a kangaroo on the road and the husband shoots aimlessly into the bush, killing indiscriminately – and eventually nature uses its own power to turn the tables. Animals and birds start to attack the couple, eventually prompting a catalogue of tragic and fatal accidents.

And Rogue, Greg McLean's 2007 follow-up to Wolf Creek, features an exceedingly enraged crocodile wanting to eat a tour group led by Radha Mitchell. Rogue was inspired by the real-life story of a giant crocodile called Sweetheart who made a habit of attacking boats in the Northern Territory. Audiences have good reason to be afraid of the outback because, very often, it is actually out to get you.

The 1986 film Fair Game by filmmaker Mario Andreacchio also has an animal-related backdrop, although animals aren't the menace. The long-forgotten action-horror had a publicity boost after being championed by Quentin Tarantino, who was inspired by it for his film Death Proof; it stars Cassandra Delaney as a woman who runs an animal sanctuary in the outback and who takes her revenge on the kangaroo hunters who have made her life a living hell.

A case of class demonisation?

Which brings us back to the people of the outback: for while I’m sure there are lovely warm, kind-hearted citizens scattered throughout it, you'd never know it from watching films set there.

Dillaman believes that the demonisation of life in the outback is part of a wider drive in the horror genre that extends far beyond Australia. "There's a huge aspect of horror that translates across cultures – class fear. Wake in Fright is often compared to Deliverance – their settings couldn't be more different in all ways save remoteness and socio-economics, and yet that visceral upper middle-class fear of the rural, the uneducated, what happens where civilisation's veneer reaches its edge, rhymes perfectly."

Alamy 1978's Long Weekend told the story of a couple under siege from the outback environment (Credit: Alamy)

Di Rosso suggests there are also more practical as well as symbolic reasons why horror filmmakers might be attracted to the outback as a location – ready-made spectacular scenery, for one.

"As a backdrop, it’s such a vivid one," he says. "The horizon line expresses such a sense of expanse, it’s very evocative, and it doesn’t require much to capture it. But it's also a fairly unique landscape, and abroad this makes an impression, especially in parts of the world which are colder, or more mountainous and densely populated.

"By using the outback as a location, and by calling on the myths and archetypes that are by now quite strongly associated with it, a film has the benefit of a cinematic tradition behind it that almost guarantees, if not an audience, a certain market recognition and cultural aura. Whether the film is any good is another thing, but it's a strong base from which to depart."

On the practical side of things as well, Dillaman suggests that filmmakers have a bit more freedom and control out in the country than in the city: "Cheap [location costs] are manna from heaven for filmmakers, as are isolated locations where you can make a lot of noise or do wildly inappropriate things."

But does an outback location have the same effect on locals as it does on international viewers? Seventy-two per cent of Australians live in cities hugging the coastline and, while many travel within Australia, is the outback as alien to them as it is to non-Australians?

A history of violence

For Di Rosso it can go both ways – he points to how it can be seen as a locale that's both threatening and inspiring. "It's sometimes depicted as a place that allows people to express an individuality that might be repressed in the regimented space of the city," he says, pointing to films including hit fish-out-of-water comedy Crocodile Dundee (1986). "It's a common fantasy, about leaving behind the strictures of city life and being your more authentic self.

"But in a sizable number of Australian movies, the outback is imbued with a sense of murderous violence," he continues. "You see this in a lot of movies and television dealing with indigenous characters, by filmmakers like Ivan Sen or Warwick Thornton, where colonial violence is both historical and ongoing, and takes a myriad of forms."

Alamy Sweet Country (2017) is among the outback films that have dealt with the violence inflicted on Australia's indigenous people (Credit: Alamy)

Thornton won the 2009 Camera d'Or at Cannes for his social realist drama Samson + Delilah, about two indigenous teenagers on the run, and his 1920s-set historical thriller Sweet Country (2017) is based on the true story of an Aboriginal man driven to kill an abusive white settler.  Sen is best known now for the Mystery Road neo-Western crime franchise – two feature films and three seasons of television – which again has centred indigenous Australians.

For Sen and Thornton's Aboriginal characters, the horror of the outback doesn't lie in the landscape or the distance, the remoteness or the harshness. It's in the existence of colonial Australia in the first place, and the resulting alienation, dispossession and displacement.

The Royal Hotel is out now in the US and will be released on 3 November in the UK.

If you liked this story,  sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter , called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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Jason Di Rosso

jason di rosso movie reviews

Jason Di Rosso is ABC RN’s film critic, host of the weekly film show The Final Cut and a reviewer across a range of RN programs.

Before becoming RN’s chief film specialist, Jason spent six years as associate producer and reviewer on Movietime , a weekly show hosted by Julie Rigg. Outside the ABC, his writing on film and popular culture has appeared in GQ magazine and the  Australian .

Jason’s background in film goes back to the 1990s, when he completed a degree in communications at Perth’s Curtin University. His first job was behind the camera as a production runner, driving actors in a mini-van for a short-lived TV series called  Sweat . It sank without a trace, though it helped launch the career of a young WA actor called Heath Ledger.

The next few years saw Jason slowly drift from the film to radio, and he made features for RN’s Social History Unit,  360 documentaries  and  The Comfort Zone . Since returning to film by way of radio, he has interviewed some of cinema’s most important talents, from Isabelle Huppert to Mike Leigh.

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jason di rosso movie reviews

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Donkey with a necklace of carrots, in EO.

EO review – an innocent donkey leads the way in surreal Bresson-inspired ride

Life is seen through the eyes of a put-upon beast of burden in this beautifully photographed homage to Au Hasard Balthazar by the veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski

J erzy Skolimowski is the celebrated veteran director who first came to Cannes in 1972 with King, Queen, Knave starring Gina Lollobrigida and David Niven; now he has returned with a winter’s tale of a film, inspired by Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar from 1966. I’m not sure this is my favourite Skolimowski film, but it is engaging in many ways: beautifully photographed, sentimental and surreal in equal measure; and also stubborn – as stubborn as its hero – in its symbolism and stark pessimism.

Like Bresson, Skolimowski makes his lead a donkey, the beast that carried the Virgin Mary to Bethlehem and Jesus into Jerusalem. Skolimowski calls his animal “EO” – after its braying “eee-ohhh” sound. The place is present-day Poland, but the setting could almost be Europe at any time in the last few centuries. EO is being worked in a circus act but has to be let go because of legislation about using animals in this way. He winds up in a donkey sanctuary from which he is freed, then captured in the streets by a council worker for whose football team EO becomes a mascot. But then he is beaten by hooligans supporting the opposing team, captured by a gang trading in illicit horse- and donkey-meat, and finally rescued by a troubled young aristocrat whose haughty and devout mama (a tasty cameo for Isabelle Huppert) disapproves of her son’s louche gambling ways.

And all the time, EO observes and witnesses, his innate humility and dignity rising above crass human vanity and greed. Or, is that what is happening? The film invites us to ask if it is meaningful to attribute these characteristics to EO. He does not participate in any side of our moralising human comedy. The donkey maintains his innocence, but what choice does he have in that matter? How would a donkey without innocence behave? He is, after all, simply a beast of burden. His point of view and his consciousness are mysteries. But perhaps an alien life form, as far above humans as we are above donkeys, would regard us in the same way. And EO’s simple presence on screen is uncanny – this animal is not acting; it is being itself. But, then, perhaps we humans are deluding ourselves when we think that we can transform ourselves by the art of acting, or any other art.

Skolimowski asks us to think about all this: and for all that there is something a little sugary in the movie, it is poignant and distinctive.

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Episode #10.22

  • Episode aired Jul 16, 2013

At the Movies (2004)

Guest hosts Judith Lucy and Jason di Rosso review Pacific Rim (2013), The Heat (2013), This Is the End (2013), The Conjuring (2013) and Cloudburst (2011), and revisit the classic movie Broad... Read all Guest hosts Judith Lucy and Jason di Rosso review Pacific Rim (2013), The Heat (2013), This Is the End (2013), The Conjuring (2013) and Cloudburst (2011), and revisit the classic movie Broadcast News (1987). Guest hosts Judith Lucy and Jason di Rosso review Pacific Rim (2013), The Heat (2013), This Is the End (2013), The Conjuring (2013) and Cloudburst (2011), and revisit the classic movie Broadcast News (1987).

  • Alexandra Nittes
  • Judith Lucy
  • Jason di Rosso
  • Margaret Pomeranz

Judith Lucy

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Margaret Pomeranz

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  • Connections Features Broadcast News (1987)

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  • July 16, 2013 (Australia)
  • Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
  • Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
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  • Runtime 28 minutes
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Paul Mescal delivers an Oscar nominated performance in Aftersun, as a single dad struggling to hide his depression from his daughter

A young girl facing out to the water and man in his late 20s in a white shirt sitting on a boat

There's a time in early middle age when, as adults, we reflect back on moments in our childhood and realise that our parents were barely coping. Or perhaps not coping at all. Aftersun is a film about such a realisation, framed as a kind of extended flashback.

It begins with footage from a camcorder, shot by 11-year-old Scottish girl Sophie, holidaying with her father Calum in a Turkish seaside resort.

It's the 90s. Techno and Britpop have swept through Europe, Road Rage by Catatonia is one of the songs of the summer… and so is the Macarena. Calum (Paul Mescal, Normal People ), a divorcee in his early 30s, has come to spend quality time with daughter Sophie (Frankie Corio) and celebrate his birthday.

In their modest hotel room, soon after they've checked in, she playfully interrogates him with the camcorder: "When you were 11 what did you think you'd be doing now?"

He pauses. The question unsettles him, but the moment has soon passed.

It's only when we see the same scene again later, after we've learnt a lot more about him, that we see the question for what it is: an arrow that has found a gap in his psychological armour.

A 12 year old girl leaning on a man in his late 20s with an arm in a cast, sitting on a couch

Aftersun is a strikingly perceptive, subtly queer, coming-of-age film by Scottish first-time writer-director Charlotte Wells. It contrasts the seemingly innocuous — and at times joyous — experiences of this summer holiday with the deeper undertow of desperation that Calum tries to hide from his daughter.

The video footage as framing device infers that, many years after the events, the adult Sophie is watching. Aftersun, we soon realise, is her reverie; her nostalgic reflection on a cherished chapter in her life – infused with a more adult understanding of her father.

Mescal plays Calum as patient, supportive and gentle-natured, but there are devastating glimpses of his character's vulnerability. Corio, meanwhile, displays effortless charisma as the young Sophie, slightly tomboyish in her battered trainers, devoid of any precociousness.

A 12 year old girl and a man in his late 20s lying next to a pool

Watching them together on screen is a precious and tender experience.

The film itself seems to revel in being with them, sharing their playful banter during alfresco meals, or as they lounge by the pool or hang out in the room.

But in one scene, we realise this is no longer a memory, but a re-imagining: As Sophie sleeps in bed, the camera pans to her father on a balcony alone. More than once in the film we see Calum alone like this, as if adult Sophie is trying to fill in the gaps of what she knows about her father. The camera, which lingers gently, expresses a kind of empathy for his solitude.

A 12 year old girl leaning on a shirtless man in his late 20s, lounging by a pool

Wells's father died when she was 16, and she has said that while her film is not based on him, he was a source of inspiration. The emotional truth of the movie speaks to the lived experience of growing up with a parent who has severe mental health challenges.

The film's dramatic power creeps up on you, as the languid tempo of the holiday, the lounging around, even Calum's daily tai chi routines, become, gradually, synonymous with his depression.

Sophie, meanwhile, is at best only vaguely aware of this, as she begins to explore the world independently, hanging out with the older kids at the resort, watching them flirting and drinking.

A 12 year old girl leaning on a man in his late 20s - both in early 2000s clothes - on a bus

In coming-of-age films there is always a rupture of sorts between children and their parents, and Calum and Sophie go separate ways for an entire evening in the film's climactic and saddest sequence.

While Sophie wanders lost through the darkened grounds of the resort, enduring an awkward romantic encounter with a boy and gazing upon a queer couple kissing in a doorway, her father's evening teeters on the brink of disaster.

Wells's restraint in directing here is commendable. In one small gesture — Calum bends down to pick up somebody else's discarded cigarette and begins smoking it – she expresses his unravelling.

A man in his late 20s in a white shirt and smiling sitting at an outdoor restaurant at night

Not that the film is always understated: A recurring sequence on a dancefloor, where revellers dance to strobe lights in slow motion, is perhaps a little overloaded with symbolism.

But in this mythical space – evocative of the club scene that transformed European youth culture in the 90s — the adult Sophie and her father come together in a way that expresses the film's deep longing and sadness.

It's a motif that, by the end, comes laden with the emotional ballast of everything that the young Sophie is unable, or ill-equipped, to say.

But the most moving reunion is between the two versions of Sophie, which occurs in a bravura long take, where the video footage becomes embedded within the film we are watching. The two periods of Sophie's life melt into each other, combining the themes of memory, identity and grief in a heart-rending finale.

Aftersun is in cinemas now.

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