Feature film for Here Out West writer

Only few short years ago, Bina Bhattacharya was contemplating her career as a film maker with some degree of scepticism. At that point, she had made a short film, Wild Dances, but wasn’t having much luck getting it onto screens. Then it won Audience Choice award and Best Cinematographer at the 2017 Made in the West Film Festival and was a My Queer Career finalist in the 2018 Mardi Gras Film Festival. 

From there, Wild Dances featured in festivals in cities wide and far including Melbourne, Boston, Berlin, Manchester (UK), Edmonton (Canada) and San Jose, and California. That got the ball rolling. 

Bhattacharya was one of eight emerging writers from culturally diverse backgrounds selected to contribute a story to a film project called Here Out West.  The resulting feature length film was an unexpected success at the 2021 Sydney Film Festival, selling out sessions and acclaimed by critics and audiences. Of the eight interwoven stories, The Eternal Dance, written by Bhattacharya, is considered a stand-out. 

The Eternal Dance and Wild Dances feature elements that are important to Bhattacharya – music, heritage, culture, and human relationships – and both are evidence of her skill as a storyteller. 

Now Bhattacharya is on the verge of realising her big dream: making her own feature length film. From All Sides, written by Bhattacharya will go into production in November this year. 

The story centres around a middle-aged mixed-race couple with two children who live in Campbelltown in south-west Sydney.  Anoushka (Monique Kalmar) is an ex-professional dancer who gave up her career for domesticity. Pascal (Max Brown) is a musician who teaches at a music school. They have an open marriage. Pascal is bi-sexual and is currently having a relationship with a male student, Remy (Josh Virgona). 

Their daughter, Nina (Georgia Anderson) has aspirations to become a ballet dancer. When Anoushka’s past life as a professional dancer (which she has kept secret) comes to light it acts as a catalyst for the story. 

The script reflects a lot of Bhattacharya’s own experiences and values. 

“I wanted my first film to be a film only I could make. It was important to me to represent East and South Asian characters as fully realised, three-dimensional, sexual beings with all the ambiguity and messiness that entails. I grew up on Indian cinema and so having singing and dancing in the film is true to my taste,” she explains. 

A big fan of Bollywood, Bhattacharya wanted the music and dance in this film to feel organic. She also wanted to give credibility to different forms of dance. Anoushka’s discipline is Bharatanatyam, a form of Indian and South Asian classical dance. 

“What I observed that I found really annoying was that people who practised cultural dance were kind of boxed into “cultural dance”, you know, they weren’t seen seriously as choreographers in their own right,” says Bhattacharya. 

As a woman with Indian heritage herself, Bhattacharya is very keen to see more people of colour in Australian film, not as tokens, but as fully-fleshed out characters living interesting lives. She says it is hard to find diverse representation on the screen, let alone non-Anglo characters that are non-conventional. 

“I could not remember a film that I had seen in this country that had a naked woman of colour,” says Bhattacharya. 

She’s particularly thrilled about the actors she’s managed to engage. 

“I have my dream cast, honestly, they are so incredible […] I managed to find a middle-aged Indian woman who had a dance background and wasn’t scared off by the sexuality, in fact was really keen to embrace it, and that’s Monique Kalmar.”

Bhattacharya describes Max Brown as a “gorgeous actor who is under-used”. 

From All Sides has been developed with the support of Western Sydney arts organisations, PYT Fairfield and Campbelltown Arts Centre, and will be made by Gemme de La Femme Pictures.

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