Sweet As sends a teenager into the Pilbara with a camera and does not tell her what to find

The first thing Murra does with the camera is point it at the ground. Not at the landscape, not at the sky, not at any of the vast Pilbara panoramas that the film knows are coming. She points it down. At red dirt, at her own feet, at the small radius of earth that she controls. It is such a precise opening gesture that I wonder whether Jub Clerc directed it or whether Shantae Barnes-Cowan, who plays Murra, found it herself. Either way, it tells you everything about where this character starts and where the film intends to take her: from the ground up, at her own pace, through a lens she chooses.

Sweet As (2022, released more widely in 2023) is a coming-of-age film set on a photography workshop road trip through the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Murra is a Nyul Nyul teenager from Broome whose home life has collapsed into something she cannot stay inside any longer. Her mother is absent, her mother’s boyfriend is dangerous, and the bureaucratic system that is supposed to catch young people in freefall has offered her a place on this programme instead. She joins a group of at-risk teenagers, a patient youth worker named Fernando (Mark Coles Smith), and a bus that drives into the red interior, stopping at gorges and waterholes and rock formations where the kids are given cameras and told to photograph what they see.

The film’s structural conceit is simple: each stop on the trip is a photography exercise with a theme (self-portrait, landscape, abstract), and each exercise becomes a narrative turning point for one or more of the characters. It is not a subtle device. But Clerc handles it with enough lightness that the framework supports the story without constraining it.

The gentleness is the argument

What distinguishes Sweet As from other Australian films about Indigenous teenagers is its refusal to default to trauma as the primary register. Murra’s circumstances are difficult. The film does not minimise this. But it also does not dwell in the difficulty the way that a different kind of film might, the kind that treats disadvantage as spectacle and suffering as the price of audience sympathy.

Instead, Clerc makes a film that is warm, funny, and interested in the ordinary textures of teenage life: the awkwardness of sharing a bus with strangers, the slow negotiation of friendship, the particular horror and comedy of a group photography exercise when you are fifteen and self-conscious. Murra is shy but observant. She watches the other kids before she speaks to them. She watches the landscape before she photographs it. The camera, both the one she holds and the one filming her, mirrors this watchfulness. The film looks before it tells, and what it looks at is allowed to be beautiful without being loaded with significance.

This is a deliberate choice, and it is worth noting how rare it is. Australian cinema has produced several landmark films about Indigenous experience, and the best of them, Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton, 2009) chief among them, earn their power through an unflinching engagement with hardship. Thornton’s film is set in a Central Australian community where petrol sniffing, domestic violence, and institutional neglect are daily realities, and the film’s genius is in showing these things without commentary, letting the images carry their own weight. It is a great film. It is also an exhausting one, and its influence on the films that followed it has not always been beneficial. Too many Australian films about Indigenous characters have absorbed Thornton’s unflinching gaze without absorbing his formal discipline, and the result has been a strain of well-meaning cinema in which Aboriginal suffering is the subject and everything else is decoration.

Sweet As does something different. It takes a character whose life contains real pain and places her in a context where the pain is not the story. The story is the looking. The story is a girl learning to frame the world through a viewfinder, discovering that composition is a form of control, that choosing what to include in a photograph is also choosing what to exclude, and that this act of selection is a kind of agency.

The Pilbara as collaborator

The landscape does what the Pilbara always does in films: it overwhelms. The gorges are deep and red. The waterholes are green-black. The sky is the size of everything. Clerc and her cinematographer, Dan Freene, film the Pilbara with obvious affection and without the wide-angle grandiosity that directors sometimes default to when faced with big country. The shots are often tight, framed through car windows or bus windscreens or the viewfinder of Murra’s camera. The landscape is not presented as spectacle. It is presented as environment, as the place where these people are, and the tightness of the framing keeps the human scale in proportion to the geological one.

There is a scene at a waterhole where the teenagers swim and shout and push each other in, and the camera stays at water level, catching the light on the surface and the red walls rising behind them, and the whole thing feels like a memory of being young in a place that is too big to understand and exactly the right size to enjoy. Clerc has said in interviews that she wanted the film to feel like the Pilbara feels to the people who live there, not as a postcard but as home, and this scene achieves that.

What Top End Wedding and Sweet As share

It is worth placing Sweet As alongside Top End Wedding (Wayne Blair, 2019), another Australian film that chooses warmth and comedy as its primary registers for an Indigenous story. Blair’s film is a romantic comedy set in the Top End, and its radical quality is its ordinariness: it presents an Aboriginal couple planning a wedding as exactly what it is, a funny, stressful, joyful event that does not require the audience to process historical injustice before it can laugh. The politics are present but ambient, woven into the fabric of the characters’ lives rather than foregrounded as theme.

Sweet As shares this approach. Murra’s Indigeneity is central to who she is but it is not the film’s thesis. The film’s thesis, if it has one, is that a teenager with a camera and enough space can begin to see herself clearly, and that the act of seeing is itself a form of healing, not because it resolves anything but because it establishes a point of view. Murra ends the film still facing the same problems she started with. Her mother is still absent. The system is still inadequate. But she has a camera, and she has photographs she took herself, and she has the knowledge that she can look at the world and find something worth framing.

What Barnes-Cowan does with the role

Shantae Barnes-Cowan, in her first screen role, carries the film with a performance that is almost entirely reactive. Murra does not have long speeches. She does not have breakdowns or breakthroughs or the kind of emotional set pieces that coming-of-age films usually provide for their leads. She has glances, half-smiles, small adjustments of posture that tell you she is paying attention even when she appears withdrawn. It is a performance built from watching, and Barnes-Cowan watches with an intelligence and a guardedness that feel earned rather than directed.

The film trusts her to hold the screen without pyrotechnics, and she does. The final photograph she takes, the one the film has been building towards, is of herself, and it is an image the audience never sees. We see her taking it. We see her face afterwards. We do not see the photograph. Clerc withholds it because it belongs to Murra, not to us, and that withholding is the most eloquent thing in the film. The camera gave Murra a way to see herself, and what she saw is hers to keep.