Movies: Ballad Films

Far right and anti-immigration politics have been on the rise worldwide. In Australia, as in many other western countries, as Ordinary People was filming, a new political force began drawing on the discontent of those who felt excluded from the promi...

Every morning Betty tramps alone through the big city to join her fellow buskers in the pedestrian tunnel below, trying to earn a living. But her earnings are meager, and to make things worse, the new security guard, Joe, is trying to confiscate her ...

Essie Coffey gives the children lessons on Aboriginal culture. She speaks of the importance of teaching these kids about their traditions. Aboriginal kids are forgetting about their Aboriginal heritage because they are being taught white culture inst...

In her second film, MY LIFE AS I LIVE IT (1993), Essie Coffey returns to her home in Dodge City where she and the A-Team are running in the shire elections. Inter-cutting between 1993 and 1978, the film presents the fascinating contrasts of a society...

Forty years ago, Wollongong’s Jobs for Women Campaign, with director Robynne Murphy among its leaders, took on Australia’s most powerful company BHP – and won. But when the 1980s steel slump devastated the city’s economy, the women were forced into t...

A docu-drama shot in 1970, but not completed until 1973, the film sought to encapsulate in an experimental form issues that were under discussion within the Women’s Liberation Movement at this time and to thus contribute to action for change. In its ...

A quarter of a million drug addicts —one of the most serious consequences of the Vietnam War. These addicts were the citizens of the South, and of Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon. Shot in 1981 by three Australian women, Changing the Needle was th...

Speaking in Arabic and English, Soliman Al-Halawani, Dr. Mahmoud Hourani, Fouad Charida, Dib El Chami and Rafica El Chami Batach tell of their life in Palestine before 1948 and give eye-witness accounts of the tumultuous days of 'Al Nakba' (the catas...

This is the account of the Aboriginal People of Perth on protest to protect the Ancestral First Grandmothers' and Grandfathers' Beliefs of the Sacred Ground of the Waugul at the old Swan Brewery on the Swan River in Perth, W.A....