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https://www.theage.com.au/culture/movies/chance-find-in-a-video-store-prompts-us-release-of-a-cult-australian-movie-20250331-p5lnyf.html>
"More than four decades after it was made, a cult Australian film is being
released in the US for the first time – after a distributor found a VHS copy in
a New York video store last year.
Haydn Keenan’s raggedly boisterous drama
Going Down, about four young women
on a last night out before one leaves for New York, had a troubled production
and a patchy Australian release despite glowing reviews in 1983.
The
Australian Financial Review called
Going Down “an inspiring
achievement” with “all the wit and inventiveness that tempts a critic to call
it the best Australian film in years”. The
Sydney Morning Herald considered
it “a sharp, smart poem to those clinging on the undersides of Sydney”.
Other reviewers praised it as “a key work in the history of independent feature
filmmaking in Australia” and “one of the most unusual, and unusually
interesting, Australian features of recent times”.
The best known of the film’s stars are Tracy Mann, who played the departing
Karli; David Argue, who was both a roller-skating employment office clerk and a
drag queen; and Esben Storm, who played a sordid writer. There are cameos by
Hugh Keays-Byrne, Claudia Karvan as a child, former barrister Charles
Waterstreet, and activist Gary Foley, with songs by James Reyne, Pel Mel,
Dynamic Hepnotics and the Birthday Party on the soundtrack.
Keenan released the film himself in Australia – no distributor was interested –
and it found an audience at the now long-gone Roma cinema on Sydney’s George
Street.
But it flopped in Melbourne after unwisely opening in grand final week at a
former adult cinema. “The raincoat brigade wanted their money back,” he says.
So Keenan was stunned to get an email out of the blue from American filmmaker
and distributor Elizabeth Purchell, who wanted to release
Going Down in the
US, where it has screened only in an Australian sidebar at the Sundance Film
Festival."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
