Article, City Times, Dubai, Wednesday December 12, 2007

Dark love
Zoe Sinclair

Australian director Peter Duncan is only too happy to screen his film Unfinished Sky at DIFF despite some reservations

DIRECTOR PETER Duncan is the first to admit he’s a little worried about Dubai audience’s reaction to his movie Unfinished Sky, which tells the story of an Afghani woman, the victim of human trafficking, who falls in love with an Australian farmer.

The movie is based on the screenplay of another film, the Polish Bride, in which Monic Hendrickx plays the lead role, returning again to play the role of Tahmeena in Unfinished Sky.
Tahmeena collapses on John's (William McInnes) driveway and he reluctantly takes her in and cares for her while slowing learning her story and experiences of the dark side of Australia.
Duncan said the concept for the adaptation came about at the end of 2002 with influences of a post 9/11 world.

“It’s about how we respond to things foreign and strange,” he said, saying he believed the themes were as relevant five years on as they were in providing inspiration for the film.
Heart of the matter

“It’s, broadly, a brilliant idea to have a festival about bridging cultures, themed around that. It’s a great thing for us to be a part of it because that’s at the heart of the movie. We’re really pleased to be here and be part of it.

“I’m slightly uneasy about our screenings because of Monic’s character being Afghani and because it does have certain circumstances in which she is abused and certain circumstances in which she is intimate with men.

“That can arouse some sensitivities in the Arab world. But it’s really important that you known a film like Unfinished Sky and that filmmakers like me are able to attend festivals particularly in places like this where the aspiration is to bridge cultures and build minds.”

But Duncan cautioned that the context of the underbelly of Australian society is mainly a setting in which the love story can take place rather than the essence of the film.

“It’s that backstory that progresses as the story goes along,” he said.
Doing the right thing

“The heart of the film is the same. It’s about two people from very different worlds coming together and that is a very important and strong theme for me.
But Hendrickx saw the role of Tahmeena, nine years on from the Polish Bride and with a different story, as quite different.

“I wanted to dive into the story and to dive into the world of that woman, to seek and find connections.”

With dedication to her role, Hendrickx learnt her dialogue in Dari with the help of a voice coach.
Duncan believed, particularly in the backdrop of a festival bridging cultures, that the characters would be understood.

“His character which starts off almost as dangerous.. she turns him around.

“He becomes someone who is prepared to put his life on the line for someone he’s grown to trust and love, irrespective of the fact that she’s illegal. That fact that he becomes that reflects well on Australians. He does the right thing in the end.”

The film has already been well received at premieres at film festivals in Toronto and Australia.

Photograph - East West 101 - Sydney Morning Herald

Article, The Courier Mail, Sunday December 9th, 2007

Redcliffe Boy a Hit in Dubai

IT'S a long way from Suttons Beach to the sandy Dubai seaside, but Redcliffe boy William McInnes is leaving his mark on the Arab emirate.

The former Blue Heelers star has scored some serious screen time with his recent flick Unfinished Sky screening today at the Dubai International Film Festival.

Unfinished Sky was voted No. 1 film by Brisbane International Film Festival punters in August and also had a guernsey at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

A love story/thriller with a dash of social commentary, the tale of an Afghani refugee who stumbles onto a farm owned by McInnes's character struck a chord with the festival's motto – Bridging Cultures, Meeting Minds.

Unfinished Sky is released here next year.

Article: Sydney Morning Herald, Monday December 3rd, 2007

Walk on the Wild Side
Greg Hassell

It's been a long time between drinks for fans of edgy, complex local police drama. After the ABC's Wildside wrapped up in 1999, there's been . . . well, nothing really. That all changes this week as SBS launches East West 101, which reunites three of the key creative people from Wildside - director Peter Andrikidis, producer Steve Knapman and script producer Kris Wyld (Knapman and Wyld went on to create White Collar Blue for Ten in 2002).

Here, as in Wildside, there's a preference for gritty Sydney locations, multi-dimensional characters, naturalistic performances and a compassionate world view. But this is Wildside for a post-September 11 world. It centres on a Muslim detective, Zane Malik (Don Hany), haunted by a robbery 20 years earlier that left his father mildly brain damaged. At work Malik clashes with the bitter, racist Detective Sgt Ray Crowley (William McInnes) while their boss, DI Patricia Wright (Susie Porter), tries to maintain the peace. Each of the six episodes deals with a specific crime, set among a different ethnic sub-group, although there are several storylines that run through the series.

"It's not just a police show," Andrikidis says. "It's more about how you deal with being a Muslim in 2007 and how Australians react to that in the workplace." Knapman sees a broader message in the show - "the idea that what separates us as human beings is just ideology and it's a bit silly to go to war with each other because of that when we have so much in common."

Knapman doesn't reject comparisons with Wildside but prefers the new show. "I was never 100 per cent happy with Wildside," he says. "It was an incredibly ambitious show but it was probably a bit jagged, a bit confronting ... There are strong stylistic elements in [East West 101] that come from Wildside ... but then we have a lot of quiet, contemplative moments, a lot of psychological stuff. There's a greater and more sophisticated mix than Wildside achieved."

Andrikidis agrees: "It's a mixture of really hand-held berserk stuff to a really static, kind of commercial look. The police material has a really gritty look and the home material is almost traditional then the dream sequences are quiet surreal. It's not the in-your-face camera style of Wildside. We didn't want to repeat Wildside - it was 10 years ago."
The seed for East West 101 was planted several years ago when SBS's Glenys Rowe asked Knapman and Wyld to make a cop show for the network. She was a fan of Wildside and wanted something similarly gritty, but for an SBS audience.

"The original brief to make a crime show was good but we'd made two crime shows that were a bit different and knowing it was SBS we had to figure out how to deal with the whole multicultural aspect," Knapman says. Wary of contrivance, they approached police sources they had cultivated during Wildside. One of them suggested they talk to Hany Elbatoory, a Muslim detective of Egyptian descent who had led a group of detectives in the '90s affectionately known as the Wog Squad.
Elbatoory's stories provided the basis for East West 101. Malik is based directly on him and other characters are based on his fellow officers. For Knapman, it meant the show rang true. "It wasn't designed to suit SBS," he says. "It was just real and reflected totally the reality of policing in this state."

For SBS, the show ticks all the boxes. "What's interesting about East West 101 for SBS is that we're making a genre show but we're also meeting all their multicultural charter requirements," Knapman says. "The reality is you can make stuff that has something to say and make it entertaining and exciting."

For Hany, the issue was how closely to base his character on Elbatoory, with whom he became friends. "The dilemma is how much of the real person you bring into it - how much you end up mimicking or not. I think
I played it as close to him as possible."

The decision to make Malik Iraqi rather than Egyptian was a practical one, as Hany is part Iraqi. He could have played an Egyptian but the deciding factor was the casting of Malik's father, one of the hardest roles to fill. Finally, after the usual casting avenues had been exhausted, Hany suggested his father, Toffeek, who had never acted before.

"The guy had to speak Arabic fluently and had to speak English fluently and had to pray properly and be familiar with the Koran but also had to be free to bastardise it because the character is sick," Hany says. "For true Muslims to be on camera praying and stuff is not cool, so we had to find someone who knew all about it but was cool to do it. The clincher was he had to look like me."

It was an inspired choice. Not only was Hany snr perfect for the part, his violin playing and singing were incorporated into the show's score. "He just had the quality we were looking for," Knapman says. "He just relaxed into it and was unfazed by it - he was quite incredible."

Hany agrees his father was great but has a less reverent take on why he nailed the part. "I think because he was so confused about what was required most of the time he just appeared to be brain damaged," he says, laughing. "It just worked wonderfully."

Hany snr was not the only case of inspired amateur casting. In fact, a mix of professional and amateur actors is one of the show's distinctive features. It arose for practical reasons, as there are more than 150 speaking parts from a diverse range of backgrounds. "It was very difficult to cast," Hany says. "Often you live with blinkers on thinking that the stories we tell reflect the world that we live in but actually the industry is quite anglo-white, so when you're trying to cast ethnic roles you're dealing with a very small pool of actors. You end up finding people who can do it but they might not have done it before."

For Andrikidis, this was a blessing. "New actors listen to the other actor so they're in the scene," he says, "whereas trained actors are performing and you've got to get that out of them. It's actually a little bit easier if you get the right people who are not acting. That's why having a mix of non-actors and actors is actually a good thing."

Andrikidis's enthusiasm for the show is obvious. Asked what shows in his CV he is most proud of, he doesn't hesitate: "Wildside and this. I've kind of come full circle. Wildside was the real turning point for me. That style of performance was everything I'd tried to achieve."

He's happy to be taking risks and grateful to SBS for giving him the opportunity to create something unconventional, challenging and, hopefully, entertaining. "People are either going to love it or hate it; you can't sit in the middle," he says. "If you're in the middle you're making soap."

East West 101 begins on SBS on Thursday at 8.30pm.

The Australian, Saturday December 1st, 2007

Internal division

A new series tweaks post-9/11 anxiety to create scarily realistic drama, writes Graeme Blundell.

"YOU'RE either an Arab or you are a cop," snarls Senior Detective Crowley (William McInnes), old-school policeman, at odds with everything, especially himself. Young Muslim detective Zane Malik (Don Hany) stares him down edgily, torn between his religion and his role in the major crime squad.

A battle for dominance between two strong men or a metaphor for the fear that exists between East and West, as two lost people search for forgiveness and authenticity?

This is how SBS's seductive, highly intelligent and often abrasive new six-part police procedural series begins. And good it is, more cinematic than any crime show we've produced so far, its clever use of conventions setting up a persistent play of meanings and ambivalences.

Malik was 12 years old when a masked gunman held up the family shop and shot his father, leaving him with brain damage. The Muslim detective has never stopped hunting the shadowy figure in the black balaclava. But what was Crowley's part in the original investigation?

Crowley's son was found dead of a drug overdose, the drugs sold to him by a Lebanese dealer who is eventually found murdered. Internal affairs starts an investigation and Crowley is suddenly at Malik's mercy. Or is he? Is Crowley's redemption interwoven with that of the cop he despises?

The series is constructed around these delicious circles within circles and the appearance of rational order is transformed into a labyrinth of deceit that entraps its victims.

East West 101 is a highly ingenious version of the traditional detective story. And it works a treat as producer Steve Knapman and co-creator Kris Wyld dramatise the ambiguity inherent in the search for truth, meaning and citizenship in the post-9/11 world.

"We are playing around with the notion of an audience empathising inside a genre piece with an Arab hero; this is the game we're playing," Knapman says. "The idea was to play with the audience's emotional investment in character in a climate where there is a degree of bigotry and even racism in the media against Islam."

Habit, conditioning and ignorance are the enemies when it comes to an audience accepting a Muslim hero, Knapman believes, especially if viewers happen to switch across from Channel9. (We are hardly likely to encounter confronting truths on the anodyne Sea Patrol.)

Commissioned by SBS to do a generic crime show, Knapman and Wyld were initially perplexed. "What did they want from us?" Knapman asks. "We didn't want to do a politically correct multicultural show."

A police contact eventually led them to former policeman Hany Elbatoory, a devout Muslim, and his one-time Samoan cop offsider, a Catholic. As serving officers they had been involved in many cases skirting the problems of civic and cultural integration. "We decided to drive the show from the ground up, using the research from their real world," Knapman says.

Another inspiration was the shooting on the London Underground of 27-year-old Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes.

The scripts also drew on extensive research and the expertise of other detectives and specialist advisers that Knapman and Wyld have developed during the past 10 years with shows such as Wildside and White Collar Blue. "It was painful to write," Knapman says. "I kept fighting to make Crowley likable and Kris was more sympathetic to the Muslim position. We weren't always slapping each other on the back."

Tough nut Crowley balances the show for Knapman. "If you feel it's rarefied, controversial, public broadcaster drama created by a bunch of Howard-hating lefties, there is always the unreconstructed renegade cop for reassurance."

Director of photography Joe Pickering says he and Knapman decided to go with a French Connection feel, influenced by the brutally realistic 1971 William Friedkin cop movie. "We used zoom lenses, seeking a gritty, cold, New York look," he says with his inimitable guffaw. "We turned Parramatta into Manhattan."

When he wasn't shooting in glassy offices, dank suburban streets or sordid railway sidings, Pickering sought a distinctly Islamic tinge for the mise en scene, using mosques, streets of veiled women, Muslim bookshops and prayer sessions.

"At times it felt like I was doing a documentary in Egypt somewhere."

Pickering covers the action scenes in a scarily realistic way, utilising his distinctive grainy, wild, cinema-verite style. Hand-held cameras run through the action, zooming and frantically swinging as if carried by the SWAT police or those trying to escape them.

McInnes as Crowley carries a grimacing wryness disguising hurt, a man who obviously hasn't faced the truth about himself, his perversity and egotism unconsciously making him project his own needs and obsessions on to the clues he examines.

McInnes is an actor with a powerful technique. He has that rare actorly ability to convey energy, composure, control and solicitude.

But it never looks studied: it appears all instinct, intuition. "He's not a great one for analysing the part too much," Knapman says. "William doesn't like spending the money too early when it comes to acting."

McInnes has his character work on vulnerability as if to cure himself of it, to heal weakness.

He also does mordant banter well, with a sneering mutter, a character wounded by pain and prejudice.

Anthony Hopkins once said that good actors are always trying to conquer their cowardice, and television, a frantic, messy medium, doesn't always encourage actors to give their best. But Hany (White Collar Blue), whose father was born in Iraq, looks as if he is testing himself with a relentless self-examination.

He's so strong as Malik it's hard to imagine anyone else playing him. His body a block, he shoulders through scenes, atavistic rage just under control.

His Malik is a hero who has to decide just what kind of justice can be accomplished in the ambiguous world of modern Australia.

Knapman says he wanted to escape the stereotypes: "That idea that Muslim culture consists only of a bunch of square-headed Lebanese delinquents in a car, shouting 'f..k you' a lot."

He hopes that East West will reach those viewers who rarely watch SBS. "In great crime shows, you empathise with your head detective. If he's Muslim, does that stop you?"

East West 101, Thursday, 8.30pm, SBS.