Melbourne International Film Festival: High or Dry by Brodie Higgs
High or Dry, depicting middle-class heroin user Mark, is one of the best and most arresting documentary debuts seen in this country in decades.
Mark is a magnetic, all-consuming presence who effects everyone around him, but, as the film unflinchingly observes, his self-destructive addiction threatens everything he holds close. Director Brodie Higgs' documentary has a remarkable intimacy with Mark and his coterie of friends, but never to its detriment, instead presenting their lives with a perceptive and open mind. Whether Mark and his friends are finding a way to escape their problems or confront them, or finding a way to get get clean or get on, Higgs has captured these parts of their lives with considerable sensitivity. At times tragic, at times hilarious, this virtuoso piece of documentary film making doesn't pass judgment, instead preferring, in the best tradition of verite filmmaking, to let its audience take it all in and contemplate.
High or Dry is perhaps the most intriguing and honest Australian portrayal of the spiral of drug addiction since Monkey Grip.
Real life: Moving by Brodie Higgs
Arts Hub Australia, Monday, April 26, 2004
It’s past midnight, I am driving through the streets of Melbourne looking for street dwellers. Looking for a chat. What am I doing you ask? What else would I be doing? TV? Radio? Sleep? We all have varying degrees of empathy for other mindsets. Either the human condition fascinates you or your own environment pre-occupies your everyday discovery.
My intrepid journey was in order to create a documentary – a documentary that challenged the fabric of my own ability to communicate with those I wouldn’t usually meet, and explore the spaces between us all. We are all connected, yet in essence, we are all strangers. Maybe in light of my own feelings of slight isolation, I felt the desire to reach out to those most disassociated. When all support mechanisms subside and outside communication breaks down along the way, some are left to turn within, becoming disdainful and apparently “lost” to society. Or are they?
Our perceptions and fears are often wrong and reasons for street dwelling are varied. I endeavored to merely have a chat (with camera in hand) and hopefully debunk the myths surrounding society’s apparent lost souls. Avoiding a ‘poor you mentality’ approach, I discovered that the integrity and knowledge of the people I met often far outweighed those of “normal” people. From the ultimate of environmental activists, to the 'chess-player' who writes a brilliant play about life on the street. He remarks, ‘Who wants a life of 9 to 5 and mowing the lawn on Sundays?’ Some do, some don’t, and some can’t.
In saying this, I didn’t have a set agenda or a premeditated direction for the shooting of this film. For the sake of individuality and our ‘own’ stories, I attempted to combine the free words of my subjects with the portrayal of my own role in this communication. While it is usual practice to keep one’s fingerprints off the story, I don’t believe in hiding behind the guise of ‘objectivity’. All you can do for these types of stories is let the nuances of expression and the story’s subtext prevail. I suppose, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts…
My only through-line in Moving, is that of Paul. His love for the environment, his belief in social justice, and his sensibility towards others are often disparaged by an increasingly anonymous, hedonistic society – if only out of fear or cynical dismissiveness. Hopefully this film shows that each life has infinite value – a value that is not measurable in terms capital socio-economic standing.
With documentaries, the major skill required is to be able to tell a story that quite often emerges from the footage, not from the original idea or “script”. The problem facing the “scriptless” doco-maker, is that formulated screen language is too often what broadcasters want. Similarly, their limited ‘flavour of the month “charters”’ comes at the expense of creativity in realism and acts as a barrier to the public viewer door. When you shoot alone, are young, and want to find a spontaneous story, there is not much support. Hence, the mass exodus of film graduates to the more current affair, reporting side of the fence. Moving is my first documentary. Here’s hoping it’s not the last.
"Pushing the envelope at Real: Life on Film" by Cath Collins Screen Hub, Wednesday 28 April, 2004
“Either you’re a theory-based documentary maker and you make hindsight documentaries or you are documenting spontaneity,” says filmmaker Brodie Higgs, firmly. “I would love to continue documenting spontaneity and have that go somewhere.”
Higgs is speaking in the lead up to Real: Life on Film, Australia’s only festival dedicated to the documentary film and one that celebrates documentaries in all their forms, and particularly those that push boundaries.
[...] “The more the same medium is portrayed then the more open the public viewer door becomes," says Higgs. "The public’s expectations of boring, stereotypical documentaries dissipate towards a more naturalistic take on realism and towards films that push the boundaries a bit.” Here’s hoping.
Wednesday, May 5th, 2004: Triple J radio, national, from Mel in the Morning (Mel Bampton).
MB: With digital video cameras there's a lot more opportunity with this kind of easy technology for more and more people to get involved in filmmaking, and maybe create the next Blair Witch Project or even Oscar-winning animations like Harvie Krumpet. And documentaries are becoming even easier to make as more people get into handicams. Brodie Higgs and Sam Voutas are a couple of young filmmakers who did just that by self-funding their short docos all the way into the Real: Life on Film Festival, which has happened all week in Melbourne, and moves to Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide over the next couple of weeks. Triple's J's Megan Spencer was there to catch up with them.
BH: Hi, I'm Brodie Higgs, I'm 24 years old. I live in Melbourne.
SV: Hi there, I'm Sam Voutas, I'm 25 years old. I live in Brunswick, Melbourne.
MS: So Sam and Brodie, this is the first time both of you have made documentaries, and the first time both of you have had a documentary in a film festival. So your film, Brodie, is about homeless men living in Melbourne, is that right?
BH: Actually street dwellers. I actually started driving around in the wee hours of the morning, so I stumbled upon the wonderful world of food distribution and soup vans, and my film is a vignette of the characters that I met along the way.
MS: And what about you Sam, your film is called The Last Breadbox?
SV: Yes, that's right. It's about Beijing taxi drivers in the lead up to the Olympic Games decision in 2001.
MS: Sam and Brodie, both of you choose to make documentaries. And it doesn't sound so fashionable in this climate of film being the "new rock" in a sense. Why do you choose to make documentaries, what excites you about that artform?
SV: Well you see, what we're doing is we're making it the new rock. You know? I mean, docos have been too boring for too long, so that's what we're doing.
BH: I don't know whether or not it's about rock, but I think less is more. And docos provide a platform for me to explore the nuances of people and the quirky nature of friends and people I don't know. I think it's an entertaining perspective of life. For me, it's a simple measure of my place in Australia and as a person.
MS: For you Sam, are the possibilities with documentary endless?
SV: Ya, they are pretty endless. With fiction you've got rules, with docos, there are no rules. You don't know what you're going to get.
MS: And that's what you love about it?
SV: That's right, it's totally unpredictable.
BH: Docos are being more noticed these days because the envelope is being pushed. There are so many forms of doco, and the one thing that carries through is it speaks for the voice of the filmmaker and their subjects, and that means a hell of a lot.