The Weird Mob film festival
A Retrospective of Italo-Australian Cinema
Three Generations of Film Makers 1962-2004

Sydney: 24-26 May at NSW Parliament House
27- 29 May at Balmain Town Hall

Fifty years of work buried in indifference. Dozens of directors, hundreds of features and shorts. The cinema of Italian-Australians represents a cultural fusion that has marked the Australian film industry.

The Weird Mob is about Italian-Australians making films across three generations.
At first it was a cinema that screamed and echoed in the new continent’s open spaces. A cinema about the pain of separation which then became separation from pain. They recounted assimilation or integration, depending on the historical period.

The Weird Mob Film Festival opens with the Australian premier of the sub-titled
A Girl in Australia, (1971). Amedeo (Alberto Sordi), an Italian migrant, lives alone in a little house along the railway in Broken Hill. He dreams of an arranged marriage with an Italian woman, Carmela (Claudia Cardinale).
There were only a few films up until thirty years ago. Yet it was the Italian born Giorgio Mangiamele, who first brought Australia to Cannes (Clay, 1965). Then, the Australian cult film, They’re a Weird Mob, opened in 1966 with young stars, Walter Chiari, Chips Rafferty and Graham Kennedy and became a national success. The wogs could laugh at themselves, and cry. Then, halfway through the 1970s, post the big immigration flow from southern Italy, multiculturalism arrives, with its rhetoric of tolerance, harmony among different ethnic communities, and recognition of different cultural values.

First generation Italians found strength in telling their stories, voicing their new reality. Documentaries such as They Came, they Saw, they Concreted, provide a snapshot of they way Italian migrants transformed the Australian construction industry. Poignant shorts such as The Vegetable Mob explore the playful but serious sport of Sicilian-Australians cultivating the superior tomato.

Shorts, features and documentaries recount the resignation to a life away from home, the changing role of women, the transforming family structure – from extended to nuclear family - the hard work in the cane fields, in the mines and factories. They were unaware of their own rights and saw assimilation as a measure of acceptance.

Then the next generation is born and with them a whole new story begins. Expectations change, some negative attitudes are mitigated. Children start telling the vicissitudes of their fathers and mothers. The delicious short, Acquiring a Taste for Raffaella, sees the protagonist caught between two realities. The film has been awarded first prize by the public for best Australian short at the “Women on Women” Film Festival in Sydney.
The second generation, in spite of an apparent rejection of their alien parents, continue to speak dialect at home, not the official Italian.
Brilliant ‘half-wog’ filmmakers such as Monica Pellizzari, Fistful of Flies and Franco Di Chiera, The Joys of the Women, explore their identity.

Finally, the cinema of the third generation arrives, with actors like Pia Miranda and Vince Colosimo, and many young directors who try to narrate with a smile the strange habits of their grandparents.

The cinema of Italo-Australians is no longer an extreme act of resistance to the assimilation process, but emerges in every respect the proof of integration.
Which quietly unfolds.

Film Forums will be held Friday 27 May and Saturday 28 May at Balmain Town Hall, an immersion with film makers, academics and multiple screenings.