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Nicole Kidman and Sunny Pawar in Lion
Nicole Kidman and Sunny Pawar in Lion, which is up for best picture at the Oscars. Photograph: Allstar/Screen Australia
Nicole Kidman and Sunny Pawar in Lion, which is up for best picture at the Oscars. Photograph: Allstar/Screen Australia

Oscars 2017: Tanna and Lion bring heart to Hollywood in landmark year for Australian film

This article is more than 7 years old
Luke Buckmaster

After Mad Max: Fury Road smoked the 2016 Oscars, Australia has much to celebrate with this year’s contenders

This year, for the first time in history, two Australian films have been nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards: Lion and Hacksaw Ridge. Tanna can be considered a third, if you include best foreign-language film in the mix.

And why wouldn’t you? The foreign-language field is actually more competitive – the entire non-English speaking world of cinema is in the running – and the winner is usually superior to the more lauded best picture. It’s here you get the really eclectic stuff too, such as pallid monsters with eyeballs on their hands and black-and-white Polish dramas about nuns.

Of course, when it comes to the chances of any of the three winning, you wouldn’t bet your house on it. Or your dog. Or even your shoes. On the off-chance La La Land doesn’t nab best picture, Moonlight or Manchester by the Sea will. And Tanna has stiff competition in the brilliant German comedy Toni Erdmann, which is the odds-on favourite. Hacksaw Ridge has been nominated for six Oscars in total, and has the best shot – but only in the difficult-to-predict technical categories of sound mixing and sound editing.

I don’t wish to detract from the success of the Hacksaw Ridge by leaving it out of this discussion, but in terms of its identity as an Australian production, Mel Gibson’s gut-busting world war two pic – a movie about Americans going to war in Japan – always felt like a bit of an aberration. The other two films in the running have a lot more to say about Australian cinema and what we do best.

Tanna, co-directed by Bentley Dean and Martin Butler, is an exotic Shakespearean drama in majestic shimmering colour, reflecting the vital beauty of its South Pacific island location. Marking another first, Tanna was the first feature film to be shot entirely in Vanuatu.

Directed by Bentley Dean and Martin Butler, Tanna is one of those viewing experiences that draws to mind cliches like ‘once seen and never forgotten’. Photograph: Philippe Penel

Dean and Butler have backgrounds in documentary. Last year, along with the great TV journalist Liz Jackson, they directed one of the best episodes of the Australian current affairs show Four Corners that has been broadcast over the past few years: A Sense of Self, examining Jackson’s heartbreaking battle against Parkinson’s disease. In Tanna the pair rehash a simplistic forbidden-lovers narrative, imbuing it with sumptuous mood and ambience. It’s one of those viewing experiences that draws to mind cliches like “once seen and never forgotten”.

And Lion. Oh, Lion. The ending of director Garth Davis’s profoundly humane drama had me sobbing like a kid. While other people were using Google Street View for important purposes such as imagining a zombie apocalypse, Saroo Brierley (played by Dev Patel) used it to track down his family in India, from whom he was separated as a child.

Like many great Australian films, Lion and Tanna are deeply connected to land and geographic journeys – think the cinema of Walkabout, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, The Road Warrior, and so many others. But their trajectories are different: Tanna’s journey extends outwards while Lion’s comes in.

In a sense, they each represent something different about the current state of Australian cinema and how we have come to define it.

Tanna took Dean and Butler to far-flung Vanuatu; it is a film about their discovery. In this, it can be seen as an allegory for the “brain drain”: the fact that many of our great talents leave Australian shores to pursue opportunities abroad. Australians infiltrated Hollywood and other film industries long ago. We continue to discuss measures to keep talent here but our best folk almost always return at some point brandishing things of beauty, like the Tanna boys themselves.

In Lion, Saroo found a new home in Australia. This can symbolise the great many things which are drawn here. This country long ago became an offshore production lot for Hollywood, with a massive movie always in production or around the corner (including Alien: Covenant, Pirates of the Caribbean 5 and another Thor). Generous tax offsets play a significant part in luring these films; the calibre of our talent is also a drawcard.

In typical Australian style, the world had to tell the Australian public that Lion and Tanna were great films before the public could comprehend it for themselves. Lion dazzled overseas audiences before it arrived here (though local crowds soon embraced it), and many had not heard of Tanna until the Oscars gave it a push.

Both are wonderfully multicultural movies, at their core about humans determined to be together. That manifests in Tanna as a story of arranged marriage and forbidden love; in Lion as a search for family. How fitting it is to have them both recognised by the Academy. La La Land might have more songs, more swing and more nostalgia. Our films have more heart.

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