Here’s an email I just received from an ex student of mine, Margaret Welna, who re-visited the film the other night, at the Front Room Gallery, after watching it originally, at TINA, back in 2007. NM

Hi Neil,
Here is your review- do with it what you like. ps. i loved it!
Margaret.

I saw Streetsweeper screened on the last day of the This Is Not Art Festival 2007 in a very well lit room, and I got angry at this visual imposition, but bits stayed with me and well, I liked Neil like you like one of those people with spark… Anyway a week ago, after sunlight and afternoon beer I told him my understanding of the film and he was saying, yes yes- that’s exactly what it is (however I can’t remember that now).
In the second screening, I’m waiting to see what the judges could have read in (ahem best film Alaska International Film Festival 2008). Given that the writer may still exist but the author is dead, Mansfield pulls the curtain on this literature, but watching dismayed, again I’m involuntarily hating the film. Please Neil I silently holler- tweak the colors, make it pretty, stop drawing me into myself and what I already know, distract me so I can be western.
Two years later we still have the avoided question: Where the film’s only actor holds a freakish resemblance to the director, is this a personal portrait of a forlorn man? Mimicking the same sparseness he saw as a Sydney-sider having bought a house here, onscreen the town of Newcastle is a direct misgiving of a prominent undead bourgeoisie unrest (we still have class levels, even if we all drink what’s on tap, yet did we ever really like ourselves), but it stares back, asking again when was this soft prominent passive unrest last noted or expressed?
Normally the eyesore of a Streetsweeper is either a court appointed punishment, or a low sought community service role when education recognition is refused. But why make a feature film, for some despondent philosophy exercise, a whim? Brilliant insight is rare in film and, here we ask, where are we born, what leaves us to label ourselves to endure self appointed roles waking to a daily prescribed purpose?
Simple our character muses- “children are never lost.” Save biblically read reference, mirroring King Nebuchadnezzar self-extradition from his kingdom found on all fours ripping up the ground, eating grass, the actor face full of dirt also wails “I’m a distraught teenager!”
Afterwards in the q & a, a local stammers, stunted that it was all filmed during three days in their neighborhood. Eyes wide he is told, the cat, the dog wondering onto the set were perfectly synced flukes. Extras playing critical parts, shot in one take never noticed the ten crew standing around, and had to be chased to sign a release forms.
Now I remember what I first thought: man comes out of the ocean to start a day in a job cleaning the town graciously deemed invisible by the better off public, as the question settles ingrained over his this self imposed task, he is ill, reduced, lone.

Margaret Welna is the Co-Director of short film ‘The Art of Dying Young’ currently studying Communication at the University of Newcastle.

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