The very concept of an independent film – one financed outside the traditional system, usually with little to no guarantee of distribution – is a concerning proposition in Australia. There is a sense locally made films battle upstream from the start, fighting for eyeballs against a backdrop of diminished market share and inundation of foreign content.

The release of writer-director Dee McLachlan’s riveting 2007 thriller The Jammed, a fictitious examination of Melbourne sex slaves told with shocking street-level realism, embodied the excitement in discovering a great indie but warned of the heightened challenges such films face in finding an audience. McLachlan’s fast-paced exposé came perilously close to plummeting into instant obscurity, but ultimately achieved one of the most inspiring success stories of any locally made independent film.

Initially the producers managed to secure just one screen in the country, at Melbourne’s Cinema Nova, to play it for a limited two-week run. After a handful of critics – notably David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz – gave The Jammed gushing reviews, audiences arrived to see what the fuss was about. Word of mouth spread and the film went on to achieve the highest-grossing weekly opening screen average of any Australian indie in history.

The trailer for The Jammed

Screenings expanded across the country and two weeks became 20. The film sparked a national conversation about sex slaves – including the creation of a website launched by the Age – and inspired a change of rules at the AFI awards after a public outcry when the film was initially deemed ineligible because of its unconventional distribution.

After studying court transcripts from a late 1990s Melbourne case involving Asian sex workers transported between brothels then deported by the immigration department, McLachlan developed a screenplay about an initially reluctant protagonist who spearheads a DIY investigation into the whereabouts of a missing young woman. An insurance clerk, Ashley (Veronica Sywak), accidentally meets a Chinese women, Sunee (Amanda Ma), at the airport and is suckered into giving her a lift. Sunee, who speaks very little English, convinces Ashley to help her to find her missing daughter, Rubi (Sun Park), who she believes to be a sex worker.

Like Vanya (Saskia Burmeister) and Crystal (Emma Lung), Rubi doesn’t have a valid visa and is caught in a rut. If she goes to the police she will be deported; if she says nothing she is forced to endure horrible violations of her body and rights. An encounter between Ashley and a thug in a park suggests for a moment The Jammed might spill into cliche cloak–and–dagger genre tropes, but it never does. McLachlan pairs an atmosphere of gritty verisimilitude with a pulse-pounding pace and plotline.

The cast, led by a balanced performance by Sywak, equally headstrong and compassionate, is uniformly excellent. Burmeister, Lung and Park take on challenging roles with zeal; their performances are a large part of the film’s grim raison d’etre and will linger long in the memory.

McLachlan hangs everything together with a throbbing sense of immediacy, spanning the film’s pre-opening credit glimpses of a woman quizzed by police to a powder keg finale of dramatic moments.

While this scungy storyline is anything but cheerful, the heartening tale around the film’s release and distribution is one for the ages. The Jammed is an Aussie indie through and through -–and an oxygen-depleting thriller to savour and revisit.