Ties That Bind KRIV STENDERS’ AUSTRALIA DAY AND THE PROBLEMS OF PATRIOTISM

Within the opening seconds of Australia Day (Kriv Stenders, 2017), we’re off and running. The film cuts between separate pairs of feet pounding the pavement, the thudding score driving us forward with them. As the faces of our three protagonists are revealed, desperation writ plainly across them, we become locked into their breathless beats for the remainder of the film, with little chance to exhale. The three paths we follow are those of April (Miah Madden), a fourteen-year-old Aboriginal Australian fleeing from domestic violence and a police chase that left her sister dead; Lan (Jenny Wu), a Chinese woman whose broken English prevents her from communicating the terror from which she is escaping, but who is adamant that the police won’t help; and Sami (Elias Anton), a second-generation Iranian-Australian accused of raping his teenage friend Chloe (Isabelle Cornish) by her revenge-seeking older brothers. This opening sequence neatly sets up the high stakes of the film, structurally and thematically; it is an ambitious, intricate work that is compositionally satisfying and vigorously directed. Yet the power exerted in its delivery does, at times, risk wearing the viewer down.

Australia Day, explained Stenders during a Q&A following