Words: Kevin Childs | Image: Contributed

AN ALMOST century-old silent masterpiece of documentary filmmaking will be given new life next month when an acclaimed singer performs a “sound-track”.
Grass, made in 1925, recounts the yearly migration of 50,000 tribespeople into Iran, taking 500,000 animals across fierce wide rivers and snowy peaks to fresh pasture. The trek has been going on for a thousand years.
The film will be shown at the Castlemaine Documentary Festival, which runs from June 16 to 18, with the music by ZOJ, a Ballarat duo comprising acclaimed singer Gelareh Pour and her partner on drums, Brian O’Dwyer.
Festival director Claire Jager found ZOJ, which is modern Persian for couple, through a computer search for Iranian musicians in Central Victoria who might compose an original score. To Jager’s knowledge, such a silent film-live music collaboration has not been done before.
Born in Iran, Gelareh is a singer and songwriter, who also plays a bowed lute
called a qeychak. She has performed in Iran, Tajikistan and across Europe. In
Australia she has appeared at festivals and venues across the country, collaborating
with leading innovative musicians as well as producing three albums.
So how did all this come about? “Inadvertently,” says director Jager. “A Turkish
woman got in touch with me to suggest a festival of Iranian films, which led to Grass.”
Another happy coincidence: it will be shown during Refugee Week.
It is one of the first films to study a culture. Jager says she knew of it through her
30 years in the field of documentaries and was able to track down a new print in the
US.
Under its full title, Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, the documentary was chosen
for preservation by the American Library of Congress as “culturally, historically or
aesthetically significant”.
Another reason for Grass having such fame is that Merian C. Cooper, one of its
three directors and producers went on to make the classic King Kong.
Another producer was Marguerite Harrison, who also worked as a reporter and
translator as well as spying for the US in Japan and the Soviet Union in the 1920s.
She was held for 10 months in the notorious Lubyanka prison.
She first met Cooper at a ball in Warsaw during the early days of the war between
Russia and Poland, giving him food, blankets and books when the Russians jailed
him in 1920.
By contrast, another documentary takes the viewer into the world of descendants
of camel drivers in Australia, commonly called Afghans, although most were from
the far west of British India, including today’s Pakistan. Others came from Egypt and
Turkiye.
Watandar, My Countryman centres on an effort by a descendant of the cameleers,
Muzafar Ali, to film them to try to understand his new Afghan-Australian identity. It
is directed, written, and produced by Jolyon Hoff who, like Ali, lives in Indonesia.
Journeying far from his favourite surfing beaches, Hoff undertook a type of road
trip looking for the cameleers and filming Ali on his mission.
Another festival highlight is Weed & Wine, described by Jager as an intriguing
account of a French family with centuries-old vineyards and a son who runs a staterecognised cannabis farm in California.
And this year C-Doc introduces a second venue – The Yurt – a beautiful microcinema located in easy walking distance to the Theatre Royal. The Yurt features
an alternative program of family-friendly sessions across the Saturday and Sunday
mornings and enticing programs for young people in the afternoons and evenings.
It will also host an immersive interactive parlour game, Werewolves, for more daring
festival-goers.
Link and tickets: www.cdocff.com.au

BESTSELLING author Tim Winton is coming to the region with a message of hope: good
information and organisation can stop destruction of our world.
He’s spent decades striving to save one of the last intact wild places left on Earth, Ningaloo Reef on Western Australia’s remote coast, beside the Indian Ocean. Once given over to the fishing of turtles and whales and set to become a quarry and an oilfield, it now has World Heritage listing.
Winton will be in Castlemaine and Kyneton next month talking ahead of what is said to be his visually stunning three-part TV documentary on the reef.
Author of 29 books which have sold in the millions, and winner of countless awards, the 62-year-old father of three and grandfather of two is seen stopping a whale shark, getting hit by a critically endangered ray, holding a dugong against his heart, saving baby turtles and encountering sea snakes and
tiger sharks.
All this began about 23 years ago when he gave the campaign $28,000 from the Miles
Franklin Award for his book Dirt Music. Now a National Trust Living Treasure, Winton
largely set aside his writing to throw himself into the fight for Ningaloo, an indigenous
word for promontory.
Here, as he says, where the desert has its feet in the sea, survival depends on a clash of ideas. What has happened is a beacon of hope on the edge of an abyss. It’s a place, Winton says, that could teach us how to get things right if we just pause a moment and listen.
Not that it was a complete triumph, however. “We tried to get all three eco-systems (heritage) listed as an entity. Exmouth Gulf was to be included but developers white-anted it.”
One irony is that just recently thousands of people from all over the world came
to Exmouth to see another natural phenomenon, an eclipse of the sun.
So is he ever dispirited? “Every day. I’m enraged daily, and nightly, by the poverty of public discussion, but slipping into despair is giving victory to the dark side. We have to cling to life, we have to cling to hope.
“People are tired of being told something is impossible when it is possible. Every lake, every forest that is saved is because people acted.”
The documentary was made, he tells The Local, “in my other spare time” and done out of a sense of duty. He didn’t want to be on television but without him there was no money for the project, while cracking the old joke, “I’ve got a good face for radio”.
Cultural and ecological values are examined in the series which, Winton says, is not as outstanding as, say, the BBC might make, but nevertheless is blue chip natural history.
Making it meant working in “a bubble”, a massive, six-days-a-week undertaking
involving animals and children, where the day’s script changed all the time.
Having always worked alone, he found it strange at the age of 60 to be with a
team working for the long haul. “The writing is different. It’s a recipe, a wish-list for the animals to show up at a certain time…”
Filmed over 57 weeks during Covid lock-downs, and in collaboration with traditional owners and cultural advisers, the series involves almost 100 experts in fields such as archaeology, geoscience, biology, marine science and eco-tourism.
Now the documentary, called Ningaloo Nyinggulu, is to be shown on the ABC and in more than 100 countries.
This is not a campaign documentary, Winton adds. “I just hope that when people
see one of the last places of global significance they will be inspired.”
At the end of our 20-minute phone talk, Winton discloses that, in spite of the
demands of the documentary, he has that day finished another novel. “But I don’t
know if anyone will want to publish it. Shit, what else would I do?”
Words: Kevin Childs | Main image: Vee@BlueMediaExmouth

The Local has six books by Tim Winton to give away to readers. For the chance to win
email donna@tlnews.com.au with your name, town, contact number and which title
you would like to win from Eyrie, Shallows, The Shepherds Hut, The Riders, Three
Plays and An Open Swimmer. Entries close on Friday, May 5.