Australian
Screen

Clip description

Katrina Skinner (Emily Barclay) is watching television when her father John (Robert Morgan) comes in, talking to a local detective on the phone. Katrina angrily denies she was at the pub the night before, when a handbag was stolen. The action jumps forward to a documentary-style interview in which Aunty Dianne (Genevieve Lemon), a family friend, fills in the Skinner family history – drug-addicted mother who abandoned her children and a father who indulged them, especially Katrina. A flashback shows the children’s mother returning to the house, calling their names but unable to come inside.

Curator’s notes

The film moves confidently through time shifts and different narrators. The form is partly mockumentary, but not strictly so. There are four time periods in this clip, from before John’s death, to after, then way back to the children’s upbringing, in which director Paul Goldman also cranks up the film speed (as the kids play around the new bird bath) to increase pace and comedy. He also ruptures the film’s realism by different graphic techniques (the sequence of cars that becomes a portrait of Katrina). All of this contributes to the sense that this world is a media concoction, a not-quite-real life within a film, within a film. It’s not just Katrina who wants her 15 minutes of fame. Aunty Dianne, who’s clearly been John’s lover for years, also wants her time. The tone of the clip is both shocking (for the way Katrina talks to her father and the suggestion of physical intimacy between them) and sad (the depiction of the mother as a zombie, calling outside the house for her babies), but the emotion isn’t laboured. In fact, quite the opposite: it’s easy to miss the mother’s distress because of the comic treatment, but it’s there.