Frozen Hearts Coming of Age in Somersault
In 2010, as the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was congratulating itself for finally anointing a woman, Kathryn Bigelow, as Best Director, its Australian counterpart had already bestowed its equivalent award on no fewer than eight female filmmakers. Starting with Gillian Armstrong’s success in 1979, subsequent AFI (later AACTA) awards for Best Director had been presented to Nadia Tass, Jocelyn Moorhouse, Jane Campion, Sue Brooks, Sarah Watt, Elissa Down and – at that time, most recently – Cate Shortland for her debut film, Somersault (2004).1
Yet this statistic – incredible in contrast – presents nothing like the complete picture of women in Australian film, which has always been complex and fraught with challenges. As lazy and redundant as it is to distil such diverse and idiosyncratic works into a single genre based solely on gender, it is precisely this idea of a definable female sensibility that has seen the parameters of Australian film expand and shift. In an editors’ preface to the seminal 1987 essay anthology Don’t Shoot Darling! Women’s Independent Filmmaking in Australia, Annette Blonski, Barbara Creed and Freda Freiberg explain that:
So much of women’s work has gone unrecorded and unmarked; so much of our history exists merely as footnotes to accounts of the exploits of famous men. It has become a significant part of the modern feminist project to recover our history, and to write it ourselves.2
This unrecorded history is, a film that closely examines the coming of age of a complex female character, and doesn’t flinch from the complexities it finds there.
