ACMI Stories & Ideas Folgen

Lauded by the Museum of Modern Art in New York as “one of the great modern masters of the cinema” Roman Polanski has over the course of five decades refined a formal film language and expressed a mordantly ironic worldview in genre-defining films that are provocative, compelling and inventive. ROMAN: 10 x Polanski proposes ten key films drawn from Polanski’s filmography – from the director’s Polish New Wave debut, Knife in the Water to his 2010 political thriller, The Ghost Writer, by way of the director’s British films of the ‘60s, New Hollywood classics Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown and Paris-set thrillers The Tenant, Frantic and Bitter Moon. In this podcast Roberta Ciabarra who curated the season talks to Spiro Economopoulos about her reasons for picking these 10 films and how the extraordinary circumstances of Polanski's life are reflected in his work.

Nyarri Nyarri Morgan is a Martu man from the Western Desert who lives in the remote Parnngurr Community of W.A. He lived his early life with no contact with western culture until he witnessed an atomic test held by the British government in the South Australian desert. It was an experience that had a profound impact on Morgan and, over half a century later, led to a collaboration with Sydney-based immersive technology artist and director, Lynette Wallworth. His story is now the subject of the Virtual Reality film, Collisions. Collisions drops audiences in the middle of the Pilbara desert – home of Morgan and of the Martu people. This conversation will take Morgan’s experience filming Collisions as a starting point for a broader discussion of the issues facing the Martu people in this remote region of Western Australia. Joined by Wallworth, Nyarri's wife Nola and young filmmaker and Martu leader Curtis Taylor, Morgan will speak about his life, his work as an artist and the fate of the Martu people since the actions in Collisions took place. An activist elder who has seen his community through some dramatic changes, a speaker of seven western desert languages, an artist whose work has been exhibited across the world and a man whose story is now being shared in VR – meet this extraordinary Australian and his family for a discussion of culture, contention, creativity and collaboration. Lynette Wallworth is an acclaimed Australian artist and director whose immersive installations and films reflect connections between people and the natural world as well as explore fragile human states of grace. Curtis Taylor is a filmmaker, screen artist and a young Martu leader. Ngalangka Nola Taylor is a painter and one of the senior translators and cultural advisors on the Canning Stock Route Project.

Our latest VR Commission, Ghosts, Toast and the Things Unsaid is an intimate virtual reality experience that invites audiences to become the ghosts of couple, Steve and Maude, and revisit the kitchen where they fell in love, grew old and apart. The work provokes a meditation on our propensity to keep secrets, the words that go unheard, and what this means for our relationships.