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Clip description
Against a background of postwar optimism and a public mood for social change, Bob Mathews and Ken Coldicutt make a film about Melbourne’s housing shortage, A Place to Live (1950).
Curator’s notes
Excerpts from A Place to Live (1950) provide a fascinating glimpse of Melbourne’s inner-suburban slum areas in the years following the Second World War, and of the Realist Film Unit’s filmmaking style. These are placed in context with the filmmakers’ intentions and the broader social and political currents of the time.
One of Hughes’s aims with The Archive Project was to ‘remind new groups of filmmakers of a history and tradition of activism and political involvement in film’. He felt the film’s themes of surveillance and censorship had fresh relevance in the mid-2000s, when new anti-terror and sedition laws were provoking debate.
