Month: June 2023

These Two Hands – The Story Of Bowen Therapy is available as part of the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival

Tom Bowen was born in 1916 and lived a seemingly normal life working as a concreter in Victoria until he developed a system that would come to be known as the Bowen Technique. The idea was that a certain set of hand movements on someone’s skin could alleviate chronic pain permanently, which it allegedly did to the thousands of people who passed through Bowen’s care. After leaving concreting, Bowen’s practice became so busy he would often see between 65-100 patients a day until his passing in 1982. The man’s work and his life story are the central subject of These Two Hands – The Story Of Bowen Therapy and it’s certainly interesting… let’s start with that.

Belly of the Beast: A Torquay Story is available as part of the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival

Roughly one hour’s drive south of Melbourne is the little coastal town of Torquay, a small town that houses the Australian National Surfing Museum. This makes sense considering the history of Torquay as a surfing mecca, a place where several surfing legends got their start and the location that would end up inspiring the creation of well-known surf brands Rip Curl and Quicksilver. Its history is tied to the growth of one of the most Australian sports of them all, surfing… but I’m a big nerd who wouldn’t go to the beach if you paid me, let alone get on a surfboard, so I don’t know any of that history, or at least I didn’t until seeing Belly of the Beast: A Torquay story and now I have a fairly good education on the matter because this is an insanely informative film.

Walkatjurra is available as part of the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival

Since 1954 Australia has been mining uranium to supply it to other countries (mainly the US and UK, though there have been others in recent years) where it can be turned into nuclear weapons or used in power plants. Those weapons were tested in several parts of Australia up until 1963 so several areas are still pretty radioactive… and hey, there is still uranium to be mined and profit to be made so we keep digging it up. It’s been 70 years since we started digging and more and more protests are happening to try and be a force for change, hopefully ending this system once and for all. One group’s protest that’s filmed as the central focus of Walkatjurra involves a 200km walk through the desert where a lot of this mining has taken place, a mobile protest that shows that this land is precious and used by a lot of people. 

Dig Deeper is available as part of the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival

Getting into the art world is an obscenely difficult thing to do at the best of times, especially when it comes to getting your work displayed at any major gallery. This is especially hard for indigenous art which is often not given the amount of respect, attention and potential space that it deserves. It also tends to often be pigeonholed as art rooted in history that predates most people viewing it which leaves out a substantial element of indigenous art. Dig Deeper takes a look at four specific indigenous artists who stand out for pointedly defying that image and making it big in the art world and their work is absolutely stunning.

Teacher is available as part of the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival

There is no job that’s more thankless than that of a school teacher, this is a universal truth that has only become more accurate as time goes on. Not only is it a job that requires incredible time, knowledge and passion but in dealing with kids there’s the requirement of almost saintly patience and ability to deal with just about anything that comes up, all while being obscenely underpaid and working with limited resources because for some reason society has decided to make this job as hard as possible. This was all true BEFORE a global pandemic but when that happened and teaching had to be done online it got exponentially harder. In Teacher, we get a glimpse into just how much harder.