The Valley documentary captures Kangaroo Valley life among first 13 films to be announced
The first thing Kristen McLennan does is greet her chickens warmly. “Good morning girls,” he says. Then he took one and said: “Hey, little one. Did you leave me any eggs today?”
The family farm in Kiama’s inland Kangaroo Valley has 16,000 free-range chickens, supplying eggs to Sydney and the state’s South Coast. Although they were far from pets, McLennan found them friendly enough.
“When you enter the paddock, they immediately come and say ‘good morning’,” he says. “They are very loud and very happy to see us.”
McLennan found that chickens have interesting personalities.
“These are funny little things,” says the former school teacher. “They talk to you. If I’m just doing my job, they can be relatively quiet.
“But as soon as I answer a phone call, I have to move away from the chickens because when I talk, they answer me. They start talking and making really loud noises.”
McLennan and his chickens feature in Ian Darling’s new documentary (Last Quarter, Swimming pool) It will have its world premiere at the Sydney Film Festival in June. in the name ValleyA meditative and atmospheric look at the rhythms of daily life.
Darling says he has been visiting the area for 30 years, is executive director of the Shark Island Institute, which organizes artistic residencies for actors, artists, filmmakers, musicians and writers, and has always been impressed by the area’s natural beauty.
“When I was looking for a location to make a film around themes of loneliness and serenity, I thought the country community was the place to do it,” he says.
Darling and his team filmed over 100 days in Kangaroo Valley, capturing the lives of a diverse range of farmers, an artist, a shopkeeper, a police officer, a newspaper delivery boy, a baker, a builder, a football coach, musicians, firefighters, cyclists, early morning walkers and many more.
“What I didn’t appreciate was the amount of time people spent alone and quietly in country communities,” Darling says. “There was a real longing to find a point of connection with the community.”
It was always planned to be a long film, but festivalgoers should be prepared for a Frederick Wiseman-style marathon. The acclaimed American director’s cinéma vérités or observational documentaries on subjects such as a community in New York, the National Gallery in London, or a farming town in Indiana regularly lasted three or four hours without music or narration.
ValleyIt’s three hours long, again with no music or narration, which can be difficult in the age of TikTok where attention spans are short.
“From the beginning, we thought, ‘let’s give this time’ for audiences who want to take the journey to really understand what solitude and silence is and how powerful it can be,” says Darling. “I hope that festival audiences will be willing to sit in relative silence for a long time in the dark.
“But it’s a real escape from the madness that we see in the outside world, so I hope it’s seen as a very healing experience for the audience.”
McLennan and many others in the film plan to attend the screening. festivalValid between 3-14 June.
“It was pretty cool to be a part of it,” he says of the documentary. “But it was definitely a lot more complicated and difficult than I expected. I thought they would be there for 15 or 20 minutes, take a few pictures and that would be it. But it was a lot more complicated than that.”
Fortunately, the shooting did not upset the chickens.
“The only time chickens get angry is when someone flies a drone,” says McLennan. “They think it’s an eagle and they all go and hide in their trailers.
“But they were pretty happy with the extra attention because when we tried to get certain shots, they got all this extra nurturing to encourage them to stay.”
Selina Miles’ Australian documentary is among the first 13 films to be announced in the festival program. silencedA film about Australian lawyer Jennifer Robinson’s work with survivors of sexual assault and abuse, including Brittany Higgins and Amber Heard, and that of Gus Van Sant. Dead Man’s WireTrue crime thriller set in the 1970s and starring Bill Skarsgård, Dacre Montgomery and Al Pacino.
Two music documentaries are sure to be popular: Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s Broken English It is described as a loving tribute to acclaimed British singer-songwriter Marianne Faithfull, who died in January; and Tamra Davis Best Summer Featuring rediscovered performance and behind-the-scenes footage of the Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth and Foo Fighters during the 1995 Summersault tour of Australia.
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