The latest, 'Sherpa', proves truth can be stranger than fiction.

One great benefit of having a government-assisted film industry is that our filmmakers are allowed leeway in the way they make cinema. The artistic freedoms they’re permitted give real choice in the stories they want to tell.

Despite this, it’s all too common to see Australian films given the short shrift, continuously raked over the coals and negatively compared to those from much larger industries with more resources and larger audiences. Arguments suggesting that we should be making commercial hits like Red Dog all year every year are cluelessly unaware of the damage that would do to our creative landscape.

Quietly stirring away, far from the glare and scrutiny of feature film production and commentators who are all too often concerned with where the next Mad Max: Fury Road or The Dressmaker will come from, are documentaries.

It is here where our industry well and truly outdoes itself in both quality and quantity, producing a bounty of world-class feats of cinematic excellence. They are frequently finding devoted audiences and having lasting impact thanks to the support of local TV (just look at the ABC and SBS guides any given week), specialty event screenings (Gayby Baby and Frackman to examples of hits via the Tugg model), and streaming services (Tyke Elephant Outlaw, which played at last year’s Melbourne and Sydney film festivals, was released on Netflix around the world), but often gain little to no mainstream attention.

It’s about time they got their dues.

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Sherpa: Our Latest Quiet Classic

The latest example of Australia’s sterling talent in this genre is Jennifer Peedom’s Sherpa, a film that announces itself as a must-see on the big screen and another beautiful example of world-class work from our local documentarians. It arrived last week off the back of festival appearances around the globe with a bag of deserved awards and nominations including those from the Australian (AACTA) and British (BAFTA) academies.

Sherpa began life as an otherwise unassuming documentary about a man most people would never get to know. If the production of this Australian-made documentary about Mount Everest’s most revered guide had continued as planned, it would have no doubt been an informative and satisfying portrait of Phurba Tashi and the people of his quiet village in the mountains of Nepal. But things didn’t work out that way.

Midway through filming Tashi’s world record attempt for most ventures to the top of what the locals call Chomolungma, an avalanche occurred and killed 16 Sherpa guides. The film then became about the to-and-fro struggles between the Nepalese government (who have gotten rich off of the backs of Sherpas while they earn a meagre wage), the Sherpas themselves (who protest on the mountainside for better pay and safety), and the visiting Westerners (whose thousands of dollars are very quickly blowing away into the wind).

Filled as it is with soaring mountainous photography and beautiful sequences documenting everyday Nepalese life, it becomes obvious that Peedom has great respect for the region and its people. She has worked here before, having directed Everest: Beyond the Limit, Miracle on Everest (about Australian climber Lincoln Hall), and announced a narrative biopic of Tenzing Norgay, the first man to ascend, you guessed it, Mount Everest. Certainly, this knowledge is key in her having the trust of her subject. She also gets great mileage out of interviews with some of the American climbers who — in the grand tradition of boorish idiots talking too much in front of camera — consider the protests of the locals to be selfish and are more concerned about touching the tip of Everest than the wellbeing of their lowly-paid guides who provide them with hot towels and tea every morning.

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A Grand Tradition Of Niche Work

Documentaries like this rarely get mentions on Best Doco lists from the likes of the BFI, TimeOut or Flavorwire. But then again, neither do many that aren’t American, British or French. Presumably this is because there’s something precisely local and/or deeply Australian about many of our best works.

Look at the 1996 story of local political treachery in Rats in the Ranks, 1997’s Year of the Dogs about the Footscray Bulldogs, the ’80s comedy/horror flick Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, or 2008’s Ozploitation doco Not Quite Hollywood. They don’t travel well enough to have been seen on a large scale, but they rank as some of the best films made in this country. Other recent titles like Ukraine Is Not A Brothel, Only The Dead, All This Mayhem, and Women He’s Undressed typify the breadth and the world-spanning reach of our industry’s work.

The history of Australian documentaries goes back much further too. Our very first movies were documentary shorts like Marius Sester’s six-minute Melbourne Cup 1896 which, as it says on the tin, observes the racegoers and the race itself of 120 years ago. Some of our earliest features were also documentaries, with world-renowned photographer Frank Hurley using the medium to document his many Antarctic expeditions in Home of the Blizzard (1916) and South (1919).

Later, in the decades before what became known as our industry’s new wave, a slim number of documentaries and docu-dramas about the outback and nature — like The Back of Beyond (1954), Northern Safari (1956), Desert People (1967), and The Change at Groote (1968) — were popular with audiences and critics, but are rarely discussed today. Many filmmakers who would later find fame for their feature dramatic work like Peter Weir, Tim Burstall, Richard Lowenstein, and Nigel Buesst also cut their teeth on musical and experimental documentary shorts. The very first Australian film to win an Academy Award? Kokoda Front Line, a non-fiction (also, essentially propaganda) short made for pre-film newsreels that won the documentary Oscar of 1943.

It’s curious then that, in spite of this rich history, even The Guardian’s ‘Rewatching Classic Australian Films’ series featured just one solitary work of non-fiction across 112 editions — Anna Broinowski’s astonishing Forbidden Lie$. Why? I’m not sure. But it’s impossible to deny more ought to have been there if for no other reason than they sit as time capsules for our nation.

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The Increasing Appeal Of Documentary

As the world expands and borders cease to contain filmmakers’ (and audiences’) imaginations, films like Sherpa will hopefully become more common — those that look at global issues and, hopefully, shed some light on ourselves in the process. Sherpa, for instance, isn’t the first Australian documentary to examine the clash between Western civilisation and indigenous cultures. It is a topic filmmakers have mined countless times. But it is fascinating to see it be done in its own unique way.

Australian documentaries are also a great way to observe the changing influence of women in the industry. Peedom is but the latest big name, with Screen Australia’s own research suggesting an almost 50/50 split with men when it comes to women in producing roles for non-fiction film and television and a percentage of directors significantly higher than that for narrative features.

Gillian Armstrong, for instance, has made a second career out of documentaries with titles including Unfolding Florence and the Smokes and Lollies series. Lynn-Maree Milburne’s work with Richard Lowenstein in documenting the Australian music scene is essential and without comparison. Solrun Hoaas, Corinne Cantrill, Sophie Raymond, Robin Anderson, Eva Orner, and many more whose work ought to be better known and celebrated more by local cinephiles.

Peedom’s film is excellent and signals a filmmaker whose talents are burgeoning. And while some of us are bemoaning the excess of tired blockbusters like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Sherpa is a telling reminder that truth is, indeed more often than not, stranger than fiction.

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Sherpa is in cinemas now.

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Glenn Dunks is a freelance writer from Melbourne. He also works as an editor and a film festival programmer while tweeting too much at @glenndunks.