We started a magazine about Australian cinema because somebody had to

I want to say this started with a grand idea, some carefully reasoned thesis about the state of Australian film criticism and its institutional failures. It did not. It started with me trying to find something to read about Babyteeth after I saw it at a festival in mid-2019, and discovering that the options were a 300-word wire review, a trade piece about the distribution deal, and an academic paper that would not be published for another eighteen months. Three modes of coverage, and none of them were the thing I wanted, which was someone thinking out loud about the film in real time, at length, with the freedom to be wrong.

That gap is what this magazine is for. Not to replace the wire reviews or the trade press or the journals. Those do what they do and some of them do it well. But there is a space between them, a space where someone could write two thousand words about an Australian film the week it comes out and not have to justify the word count to an editor who thinks Australian cinema is a niche interest, and that space has been empty for as long as I have been paying attention.

So we are filling it. I say “we” because I cannot do this alone and would not want to. There are five of us, and I should tell you who they are because you will be reading them and you deserve to know what you are getting into.

The people

Bronte Haughey writes like she is building a legal case. She will watch a film three times before reviewing it, not because she is slow but because she does not trust her first reaction, and this distrust makes her the most careful writer I know. She trained as a lawyer and left the profession because she found it insufficiently argumentative, which tells you something about her standards for rigour. Her area is Australian drama, the broad middle of the national cinema, the films that are well made and well intentioned and sometimes better than they need to be and sometimes not.

Rhys Okoro was a projectionist before he was a writer, which means he thinks about cinema as a physical event, light through celluloid, sound in a room, bodies in seats. He is the one who will tell you about the projection quality at a premiere and mean it as genuine criticism, not pedantry. He covers genre and documentary and anything that lives at the edges of what Australian cinema is supposed to look like.

Odette Leung spent four years at a funding body and left because she wanted to write about the films rather than decide which ones got made. She brings an insider’s understanding of the production pipeline, which means she knows why certain films exist in the forms they do, what the development process did to them, what they might have been if the third draft had been the shooting draft. She writes about the industry without the reverence that industry coverage usually demands.

Kieran Voss is the youngest of us and the most certain, which is a combination that either produces great criticism or terrible criticism and very little in between. He grew up watching Australian films on SBS on weekday afternoons and formed his taste before he had the vocabulary to describe it, and the tension between that instinctive taste and the critical language he has since acquired gives his writing an energy that I find exciting and occasionally exhausting. He covers everything. He has opinions about everything. Some of them are wrong and he will defend them anyway, which is a quality I have decided to admire rather than manage.

And me. I am Mara Deng. I watch Australian films and I have nowhere to think about them out loud, which is the whole reason we are here.

What we will do

We will write about Australian films. New releases, mostly, but also older films when they feel relevant, and the occasional piece about the industry when the industry does something worth examining. We will write reviews and essays and interviews and the kind of long, discursive pieces that do not have a clean genre label but exist because someone had a thought that would not fit in eight hundred words.

We will take the films seriously. This sounds obvious but it is not. Australian cinema gets two kinds of critical attention: the boosterism that treats every local release as a triumph of the national spirit, and the dismissiveness that treats the whole enterprise as a provincial sideshow to Hollywood. Both are lazy. Both are wrong. We will try to be neither, though I expect we will fail in both directions at various points and correct ourselves when we do.

We will not pretend to be objective. Objectivity in film criticism is a fiction that serves no one. We have tastes, biases, blind spots, and personal histories that shape what we see when we watch a film, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What we will try to be is transparent. When Bronte loves a film, you will know why Bronte loves it, and the why will be specific enough that you can decide whether her reasons are your reasons.

What we will not do

We will not cover every Australian release. We do not have the resources and we do not have the interest. Some films will not get a review from us, and the absence will not be a judgement. It will be five people with limited hours making choices about where to spend their attention.

We will not be a promotional vehicle. We like filmmakers and we respect the difficulty of making films in this country, but this is a critical publication and we will write honestly about what we see. If a film does not work, we will say so, and we will try to say so in a way that is useful rather than cruel, but we will say so.

We will not pretend to represent Australian cinema in its entirety. We are five people in Sydney with particular perspectives and particular gaps in our knowledge. We will get things wrong. We will miss things. We will probably overrepresent the films that screen at the festivals we attend and underrepresent the films that screen in places we do not go. This is a limitation and we acknowledge it.

Why now

I do not have a compelling answer to this question. There is no precipitating event, no crisis in the industry that demands a new publication, no cultural moment that makes the timing feel inevitable. Australian cinema is in roughly the state it has been in for the past decade: producing good work, struggling for audiences, dependent on public funding, occasionally breaking through to international attention, mostly not. The gap in the critical conversation has existed for years. We are filling it now because we are ready now, not because the moment demands it.

That is the honest version. The aspirational version is that Australian cinema deserves sustained, thoughtful, independent coverage and we are going to provide it. Both versions are true. I prefer the honest one because it is harder to disappoint.

We start next week. Bronte has a piece about the Australian box office that will make you reconsider what you think you know about local audiences. Rhys is writing about a documentary that has not been reviewed anywhere else. I have opinions about Babyteeth that I have been sitting on for six months and am ready to inflict on someone.

Welcome to Screentimes. We will try to deserve your attention.