Stories from eight talented Western Sydney writers explore the themes of family and place in a groundbreaking film. Here Out West is much more diverse than most films, including talent from various backgrounds and featuring two or three languages… but nine: English, Arabic, Bengali, Cantonese, Kurdish, Tagalog, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Spanish.
The film is shot in Blacktown, with eight different stories, from eight different cultural backgrounds. If you remember Love, Actually, the film is a ‘hyperlink’ drama of eight separate but intertwining chapters, spanning a single day in Western Sydney.
The film captures what the writers believe authentically reflects a modern Australia, particularly life in Western Sydney. Not your traditional Australian film, but perhaps a step towards defining what traditional Australia is.
Finally making its debut as the opening film for Sydney Film Festival, it was delayed twice this year due to the pandemic.
Bina Bhattacharya is one of eight writers from Western Sydney. She used stories from her upbringing to create scripts for the film.
“We really haven’t seen a lot of films from first- and second-generation migrant people of colour. I think this is one of the first, so … I am really quietly confident this film is going to find an audience,” she said.
The film begins with Nancy taking her newborn granddaughter from a local hospital, evading social services’ plan to separate them. Some of the other stories are a bit more intertwined than others, like when Nancy’s reckless driving interrupts a fight between three friends. Here Out West doesn’t follow your regular butterfly-effect narrative but paints a portrait of an underrepresented home for 2.1 million people.
Leave a Reply