A middle-aged, multiracial couple convene in a swinger’s bar, have a spectacular orgy, and then argue with their kids about fabric softener – it’s certainly one of the gutsier ways to start a film, but ‘From All Sides’ isn’t one to shy away from the provocative…
“I think it’s training my audience as to what’s coming for the next two hours; you’re going to see a movie that juxtaposes the risqué with the mundane, because that’s how life works,” director Bina Bhattacharya says of the opening sequence.
But Bhattacharya is eager to remind me that her directorial debut exploring race and the modern Australian family is not all wanton excess.
“Every sexual interaction in this film tells you something about the characters. And I think that’s the best way…I love a bit of sex in a movie. But I don’t like it when it’s gratuitous,” she explains.
Since its premiere at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne last year, ‘From All Sides’ has seen robust crowds at screenings across independent cinemas in Melbourne and Sydney, arriving on the SBS On Demand streaming library later this year.
The film follows former dancer Anoushka, beset quite literally, ‘from all sides’ by the demands of parenting her two children Clyde and Nina, workplace racism, an anonymous threatening letter, and her sexually adventurous open relationship with husband Pascal.
“It was just a phrase I used a lot with other women of colour who are mothers – we would talk about our lives and they’d go, how are you this week, and I’d say, I’m getting it from all sides,” she says of the title.
For Bhattacharya, ‘From All Sides’ is ‘a story only she could tell’, from a life spent feeling frustrated by the status quo.
Bina Bhattacharya
“It’s a very closed shop in Australia. If you didn’t go to the right private school, you really can’t make a film in this country, which is pathetic,” she remarks. “I was in my mid-30s, looking around and noticing nobody my age was getting the opportunity. I was going to have to do it myself.”
“All my heroes are filmmakers that never sought permission – Satyajit Ray, Gregg Araki, John Waters, Sean Baker. They’re all just very talented filmmakers for whom the kinds of representation that they wanted wasn’t happening, so they took matters into their own hands.”
She is proud of the grassroots, crowdfunded nature of her project, shot in her own backyard Campbelltown over four weeks, with PYT Fairfield’s young artists involved as extras and crew attachments, and an army of aunties catering the set with biryani.
“I don’t have connections. I don’t live in the city. I can’t spend every night schmoozing people with money in the hope that one day they’ll like me enough to help me make a movie. But what I do have is community,” Bhattacharya says. “It’s just about cultivating what you do have.”
Despite the clear community presence, Bhattacharya admits to fearing backlash and judgement about ‘From All Sides’ more salacious scenes, an intriguing parallel to her protagonist Anoushka’s own paranoia about the consequences of speaking the truth.
“I’m always so terrified that somebody in my community is going to say, this is filth, you’ve made a pornographic movie…it hasn’t happened yet. It will happen one day and that’s okay, I’m ready for it,” she reflects. “All I’ll say is that for every person that’s offended by it, there’s others that think it’s a breath of fresh air.”
“I wonder if my dad was still alive, if I would have had the courage to make this film…My sister said something very kind to me – ‘Bina, if Baba was alive, he would have pretended he didn’t like the rude bits, but secretly they would have been his favourite.’”
Bhattacharya isn’t interested in being a paragon of virtue, nor does she want to tell stories about such people. From Anoushka, a middle-aged woman who enjoys sex, Clyde, a teenage truant who says the n-word, to Nina, a young woman absorbed by porn, ‘From All Sides’ is refreshingly full of morally grey characters.
“Good migrant girls fall into this trap of writing virtuous characters all the time – I don’t like movies like that. White people never do this. They can tell a story that’s so totally unflattering about their own family and no one’s going to weaponise it and say, ‘See, we can’t let them into our country’,” she muses.
It’s a far cry from the John Marsden and Tim Winton stories of her youth in Western Sydney, but she hopes to be able to shift the needle towards more realistic representation.
“We’re making movies that are stuck [in] this weird mythical time where we all lived in the country…we have a lot of colonial mythology that we have never really broken out of in our filmmaking; I wanted to make this film for who Australia actually is today, and that is women like me,” Bhattacharya says.
“You should always make a film that you yourself would go and see…middle Australia has a new face.”
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