FLOODHOUSE Trailer
‘Floodhouse is like a concentrated dose of Jane Campion and Wes Anderson combined'
- Peter Keough, Fipresci, 2004
Synopsis
After an absence of years, Mara (15) moves into her hippy Dad's shack in remote river country. Marooned in Harry's world, Mara broods on her haughty artist mother who lives at the top of the valley. When Mara falls for Herringbone John, a tramp ‘waiting for death to come along and knock him on the head’, their encounter is a trip through the ecstasy and agony of romantic love. What Mara finds on the other side sets her free.
Credits
Written and Directed by Miro Bilbrough
Producer Peter Sainsbury
DOP Kim Batterham
Production Designer Tim Ferrier
Costume Designer Terri Kibbler
Editor Andrew Macneil
Composer Amanda Brown
Sound Designer Mark Ward
Casting Nikki Barrett
Stills Photographer Simon Cardwell
Cast
Mara Victoria Thaine
Harry Robert Menzies
Ava Catherine McClements
Herringbone John Brendan Cowell
Pinny Amber Lee Hynes
Produced by Eidolon Pty Ltd in association with the Australian Film Commission, SBS Independent, New South Wales Film and Television Office with assistance from New South Wales Film and Television Office Regional Filming Fund.
Awards
Special Mention ‘for the pleasure of discovering a fresh young storyteller’, International Jury, 53rd Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival
Nominated for Best Short Film
Nominated for Best Short Screenplay
Nominated for Best Cinematography in a Non-Feature, Australia Film Institute
Nominated for Best Original Television Screenplay, Australian Writers’ Guild Awards
Nominated for Best Music in a Mini-Series or Telemovie
Nominated for Best Song in any Australian Feature film, Telemovie, TV Series or Mini-Series, Australian Guild of Screen Composers and the Australian Performing Rights Association
Festivals
2004
Australian Premiere, Fifty Minutes From Home Film Festival: Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane
European Premiere, In Competition Mannheim-Heidelberg IFF
2005
Moscow IFF
St Petersburg IFF for Festivals
Minneapolis-St Paul IFF
Theatrical Release ‘Fifty Minutes From Home’ program, Australia 2004
Broadcast SBS, ZDF/Arté
Amber Lee Hynes as PINNY
Director’s Statement
‘When I was fifteen I was sent by the Grandmother who raised me, back to my father’s house: a close relation of Harry’s shack in Floodhouse. Like Mara, I was appalled and little by little, intoxicated by the wilderness I had landed in. I used this experience to inspire Floodhouse; a film about a sheltered young woman plunged into the dreamy chaos of a rural counter-culture with its beautiful, grimy men on horseback and its caustic goddesses, its weird dietary fetishes and pre-industrial interiors. I wanted to touch an audience with the unexpected beauty and tenderness of such a place.’
Press
‘Floodhouse charts the sensual awakening of a teenage girl in the most fecund of physical and emotional environments. Beautifully photographed, acutely observed and marked by a dazzling lead performance by Victoria Thaine…Bilbrough's intimate script and precise visual approach reach deeply into characters portrayed by an excellent cast’,
- Richard Kuippers, Variety, October 29, 2003
‘A richly detailed character study of 15-year-old Mara…Thaine gives a remarkable performance as the teenager whose sensual awakening in the isolated environment is beautifully filmed and delicately told by writer-director Miro Bilbrough.’
David Stratton, TV Week, 2003
‘Potent and surprising in its re-visioning of the Australian cinematic texture…Bilbrough’s Floodhouse is the classic achievement of popular art: an intensity of effects balanced upon a simple frame…Like Bilbrough’s other films, Floodhouse is a startling example of an alternative cinematic poetics; a poetics concerned with the lyrical, literate and intimate’,
- Luke Carman, 'Transcendental Waters: George Miller and the Ciné-poetics of Miro Bilbrough', Southerly Journal
‘Floodhouse…is awe-inspiring for its frank honesty… one of those films you want to see again’
- Ron Holloway, 53rd Mannheim-Heidelberg IFF, German Film, 2004.
‘Floodhouse is great film-making because it feels like its been worn by its author; lived and shared as intimate stories on a mattress in the middle of the night, recreated as a work of short fiction—allowing the imagination to arbitrate fact—and then, only then, adapted to the screen with a deep love by all those involved for the material.’
- Michael Kitson, ‘Fifty Minutes From Home: An Australian Film Festival’, Metro, issue 139, 2004.
Robert Menzies as HARRY
Catherine McClements as AVA, Victoria Thaine as MARA