Full program podcast: Recent Episodes
ABC Radio
Fenella Kernebone looks at how we shape our world, from the ground up. One single audio file of each program - good for continuous listening.
We have a distorted view on that which gives us life.
More valuable than platinum, yet sold for a few cents a mega litre.
We contaminate it, let it evaporate, complain when it dries up, and fear it when it overflows.
This week is all about seafood, water and life as we board the MV Melburnian with 10 Radio National listeners, a fisherman, a fishmonger, an internationally renowned seafood chef, and a muso.
Saigon's Wartime Beat - Sheila Pham goes in search of the rock music her parents listened to during the 60's and 70's
In this last episode of Movietime, Julie Rigg reflects on a 40+ year career with Weekend Arts presenter Sarah Kanowski. Plus, a couple of highlights from Julie's time at RN: a 2003 interview with Danish director Lars Von Trier, just after he made Dogville, and from the same year a conversation with Quentin Tarantino, recorded in the lead up to the release of Kill Bill.
This week on Movietime Summer an interview with 'the mother of the French new Wave', Agnes Varda. The interview was recorded in 2001, just after the release of her marvellous documentary The Gleaners and I, a film about the tradition of gleaning crops after the harvest, and the legal rights of the gleaners. It is also about urban gleaners who scavenge food at urban markets, and goods discarded on the streets in a society built on waste. We meet them as philosophers, not as victims, and a wonderfully wide and eccentric range of people they are. Beyond this, the film is about how art is made, about artists as gleaners, collecting and refashioning images and ideas. And finally, it is about Agnes Varda herself, then in her mid-seventies: in fact Varda’s film starts with the Millet painting of the gleaners and at one stage she very cheekily turns the camera on herself, clutching a sheaf of wheat. Varda has called the film 'Agnes in the year 2000', and it's also about time passing, and her own ageing. She actually does this gallant thing and focuses her little digital camera on her own hand, the wrinkles, the blotches -- and in another sequence where she runs a comb through her hair, she shows the grey near the part, where the red dye grows out. She spoke to Julie on the line from Paris.
This week on Movietime's Summer series something quite special -- and never before broadcast -- a panel discussion with the master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami featuring Julie Rigg with critics David Stratton and Adrian Martin.
On Movietime's Summer series this week, an in depth conversation with Benh Zeiltin, director of one of the more remarkable films released this past year: Beasts of the Southern Wild. Set in a rough and ready community called The Bathtub, deep in the Louisiana bayou, the story is told through the eyes of a remarkable six year old girl called Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis), whose father Wink is trying to teach her how to survive on her own. Her mother has disappeared; and in this rough hewn community built from scraps and salvage, everyone is aware that they live very close to nature, and that the climate is changing. One day, a storm will come, the river will rise, and The Bathtub may be no more. This conversation hosted by Julie Rigg was recorded at the 2012 Melbourne International Film Festival.
This week on Movietime's Summer series we look back at one of the big events for Australian cinema in 2012, The Sapphires. Adapted by Tony Briggs from his own hit musical, it's a film about four young Aboriginal women (Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy, Shari Sebbens, Miranda Tapsell) who form a soul group under the guidance of an unlikely Irish impresario (Chris O'Dowd) to tour Vietnam and entertain the troops. The story was inspired by the experiences of Briggs' mother and aunties who toured Victoria in a similar group, and in the case of his mother and one aunt, also travelled to Vietnam as entertainers. In this panel hosted by Jason Di Rosso and recorded at the 2012 Melbourne International Film Festival, we’ll hear from Tony Briggs, his mother Lauren Robinson, his aunt Lois Peeler, director Wayne Blair and producers Rosemary Blight and Kylie du Fresne.
This week on Movietime's Summer series we follow up our discussion with film scholar Mark Cousins, writer and director of The Story of Film: An Odyssey, and take up the question of alternative approaches to understanding film history -- or maybe histories. In particular, that vexed question of The Canon. Is it necessary, or even inevitable? Julie Rigg is joined by Paul Harris, host of Triple R's Film Buff's Forecast and Deb Verhoeven, Chair of Media and Communication at Deakin University, to tease out these issues in a forum recorded at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in October 2012.
This week we’re talking blockbuster adaptations. Ang Lee discusses bringing the ‘unfilmable’ Life of Pi to the screen, plus we review two Boxing Day films with strong antipodean links: Les Miserables, starring Hugh Jackman and Russel Crowe, and Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit; An Unexpected Journey.
That’s Amore! This week three new romantic comedies set in Italy, France and the US give us very different takes on love. The French film, Paris- Manhattan, stars Alice Taglioni as an unlucky-in-love pharmacist who’s obsessed with Woody Allen. But do any of these movies live up to the classics of this much loved, and much maligned cinematic genre? Guest reviewer Fiona Williams from SBS Film joins Jason Di Rosso to give her take on this bonanza week for romantics...
At 82, Clint Eastwood is still powering on, as actor as well as director. Trouble With the Curve gives him a chance to shine, as an ageing baseball scout with failing eyesight and seasoned judgment. Amy Adams plays the lawyer daughter he used to take on the road. A fine performance unblemished by phony sentiment. Plus, how New Zealand director Florian Habicht made his dad a star, in the offbeat comic drama Love Story.
This week, a special report on the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. Now in its sixth year, the Asia Pacific Screen Academy is building a ground breaking cultural collaboration across the region. We meet this year’s winners, writer-director Emin Alper, and actor Tamer Levent whose film Beyond The Hill won Best Feature at last week’s APSAs. Julie Rigg reports on the achievements of the Brisbane based Academy so far, and its future. Also this week: the antithesis of the romantic comedy: the breakup comedy, Celeste and Jesse Forever.
A bumper Movietime this week. Jason di Rosso talks with Paul Thomas Anderson about his dark, disturbing film The Master, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as a manipulative cult leader and Joaquin Phoenix as a brain-addled disciple. Julie Rigg talks with Ben Lewin about his Sundance hit The Sessions: the story of a polio disabled poet and a sex surrogate.
On Movietime this week, a duo of French films. You Will be My Son is a strong family drama about succession in a French vineyard, as a formidable father chooses to pass over his own son in favour of the son of his foreman. And we meet Bouli Lanners, the delightful comic actor from Belgium who has now made a thoughtful film about two runaway teenage boys: The Giants.
This week on Movietime, we meet Amiel Courtin-Wilson, whose new film Hail is groundbreaking Australian cinema. We also meet Mark Cousins, whose monumental, 15 hour documentary series The Story of Film: An Odyssey is a seductive guide to the development of film language and aesthetics. And we review Argo, Ben Affleck’s high voltage drama about the 1980 rescue of six American hostages from Tehran, disguising them as a film crew.
Oliver Stone takes on the Mexican drug cartel wars in Savages, Woody Allen, at 77 back on screen in To Rome with Love, and the strangely engaging Safety Not Guaranteed, a film which began with a personal ad. We talk with its director, Colin Trevorrow.
On Movietime this week: Lawless, Killing Them Softly and the poetry of violence.
Two Hollywood based Australian directors, John Hillcoat (Lawless) and Andrew Dominik (Killing Them Softly) have new films out this week: both dark, polished essays in power, corruption and violence. But when does on-screen violence become a film fetish?
Plus: Andrea Arnold’s radical new version of Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff, according to Bronte, was a Lascar orphan. Showing him as one reconfigures this classic gothic drama.
This week: Mental...it’s OK to be funny. Director PJ Hogan’s new comedy not only questions the odd behaviour we accept as 'normal' but confronts an even larger taboo: that one shouldn’t make jokes about mental illness. Better to treat the mad either as victims or heroes overcoming suffering. But surely it’s a lot more complicated than that? And sometimes funnier?
Plus: clampdown in Iran. Last week Iran pulled its entry from the Oscars; blocked Google and YouTube, and arrested the head of the House of Cinema, the 20-year-old independent cultural organisation (like the BFI and the AFI) which brokers relations between filmmakers in Iran and the rest of the world. Iranian film has been one of the great national movements in cinema of the past twenty years. How will its filmmakers continue to work as the screws tighten?
On Movietime this week we meet Toni Collette, star of the upcoming PJ Hogan comedy Mental, and Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries), the Brazilian filmmaker whose screen version of Kerouac’s On The Road opens here this week. In Trash and Treasure Peter Bishop discusses utopian visions in cinema, and in particular the film Lost Horizon: part of RN’s exploration of utopia and a brace of programs called 'Perfect Worlds'.
This week, the magical fantasy Beasts of the Southern Wild, finally in cinemas. A film unlike any other you’ve seen. And we are tipping an Oscar nomination for its young star Qvenzhane Wallis. Plus, its director Benh Zeitlin tells us how to train a pig to impersonate an auroch.
This week we meet Kath and Kim to talk about maternal guilt, Kimmy’s first tantrum and the influence of Italian neo realism on their film Kath and Kimderella. Plus an interview with Philippe Falardeau, writer director of the Oscar nominated Monsieur Lazhar.
In multicultural Australia personal histories can be rich beyond imagining, and the life story of Campbelltown resident Feng Shan Xu is one such tale.
Two of the most marginalised groups in Rwanda are the slum dwellers and the traditional population known as the Batwa. On the hills outside Rwanda's capital city, Kigali, traditional Batwa musicians found a new voice in the urban community through an unlikely collaboration with local hip-hop star, Pacachi.
Touring is a tough but essential part of any professional musician's life but for up and coming independent artists it can be a downright hard slog. In November 2010 three Australian hip hop acts embarked on a national tour they called 'Wildside' and this is their story.
Once upon a time it would have been unthinkable for a credible rock musician to spend any time playing tribute to other rock musicians. There's a world wide phenomenon come to rise over the past few years. Known as a tribute night, experienced musicians with careers of their own gather to 'pay tribute' to classic artists like the Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin, and middle aged audiences are dancing like teenagers again.
In this observational documentary, producer Kyla Brettle takes us into the lives of aspiring musicians as they audition for one of Australia's most prestigious music performance schools.
Music may be the food of love, but perfection in music has a voracious appetite- demanding hours of practice from its more or less willing participants. But how do musicians practise? How does preparation away from an audience ensure a successful appearance on stage? To what extent is practice itself an art - or perhaps a craft? 'The Road to Perfection' meets a range of musicians who speak frankly of the techniques, tips and tribulations of their daily practice.
Joseph Schmidt was a tenor who lived in the first half of the twentieth century, whose glorious sound and way with a song made him a hugely popular radio star and recording artist; he was also the first singer the Nazis banned from Berlin radio. In this moving account of his life, we hear the songs immortalised by Joseph Schmidt's voice, as producer Natalie Kestecher searches the archives and the recollections of those old enough to remember.
Could you mend a broken heart by singing love songs for a year? This musical travelogue follows musician and writer Linda Neil as she travels with her violin and voice from Australia to India, Paris and Nepal, writing and singing love songs while recovering from the trauma of illness and loss.
A story of an old Christmas carolling tradition lost and found again in a small village in Newfoundland. Producer Chris Brookes tracks down the village carollers and follows them on their rounds as they sing their mediaeval melodies.
In his lifetime Blind Tom was the toast of America and Europe, a Negro slave pianist who was regarded either as a musical genius or a moronic idiot with a freakish capacity to play any composition he heard once and an inimitable imitator of sounds and speeches.
Celebrating Australian music month, a multi-faceted audio and video portrait of Linsey Pollak, Queensland-based musician, instrument-maker, composer, musical director and community music facilitator.
When John Coltrane wrote 'Alabama' in 1963, his music decried the white supremacist terror attack in Alabama that year and his saxophone solo echoed the patterns of Martin Luther's funeral oration.
Into the Music explores the wild and vibrant Maltese vernacular singing known as Ghana, in this special feature by Australian composer Robert Iolini.
A musical feature on the unique harmonic chanting of the Gyuto Monks, who have been coming to Australia annually since 1994 to spread awareness of Tibetan culture. Great Chantmaster of Gyuto Tantric University, Lobsang Tsering, provides a step-by-step guide to the process of visualisations followed by these masters of Tibetan Buddhist tantric ritual during their famous harmonic chanting.