and opinions some people might find offensive but for which I won’t apologise.
Don’t read any further unless you are open-minded.
Also, hard as I try not to give away too much, I can't guarantee there are no spoilers.
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Radiance – Movie 1998 Australia. 83 Mins
One of the best Australian movies ever made.
A mother’s death draws her three estranged (Indigenous) daughters back to their ramshackle childhood home on the remote North Queensland coast, where they are forced to confront her legacy of half-truths, unfinished business and family secrets.
The sisters have drifted about as far apart as it is possible to drift and each of them has a different reason for returning. Over the course of twenty four hours, the skeletons in the family closet emerge, rattling violently.
Cressy the eldest is a diva—an opera singer who is reluctant to revisit the past and certainly doesn't want to share it with her sisters.
However nurse Mae, the second sister, believes that Cressy hasn't shared enough.
And Nona, the youngest—the party girl—just wants them all to be one big, happy family!
Interestingly, this movie marked Deborah Mailman’s feature film debut, and she must have been beside herself with delight to be offered the role of Nona, for which she won a well-deserved AFI Best Actress Award.
Also starring Trisha Morton-Thomas and featuring a rare on-screen appearance by Rachel Maza, the movie was filmed around Agnes Waters and Bundaberg in sugar cane country, Queensland.
This was the first feature Rachel Perkins directed, and like most of her work that followed it is a work of genius. Although it is based on a play by a white writer (Louis Nowra) Perkins said he managed to "inform the characters with a social history that was uniquely Indigenous but it hadn’t dominated it – he’d allowed the characters to have a life outside of that”.
Like many of Perkins' fiction works, this has a story that is universal.
This is one of those Australian films that is difficult to buy - it regularly appears online on SBS On Demand (free) but if you want to own a copy it is now available through the NFSA distribution service.
Margaret Pomeranz’ 1998 interview with Rachel https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/11700291739 (SBS online might not be available outside Australia)
A desert island must.
