The fantastic food Anna made for the screening at her place.

I found this review of our film in Russian after the Vladivostok Film Festival. It’s from a blog called “A Priori” which is all in Cyrillic! This is a translation using Google. I like it…. TR

About “Cleaner” (”Streetsweeper”) it would be desirable to think still, but to tell already too it would be desirable.

The main and only hero – Keith (Marin Mimitsa, Marin Mimica), a municipal employee, a janitor, though obviously homeless and no money in his life there – only found food, choose clothes. A feeling that this function – to ride through the city with a trolley and brushes to clean the zebra pedestrian and road signs, welcoming passers-by – he took himself. It is innocent, absolutely pristine, completely unnecessary.
What a beauty. What beauty around. What beauty around. God must be happy.
… real women, they smell like flowers and soap. I sometimes want to lie down next to a woman. Least 10 minutes. Least 10 minutes. The smell of flowers and soap. Flowers and soap.

When he puts his head on a wet rag to hide his head from the scorching sun, immediately obvious – Christ without a flock.
His time – day and night. The sun rises – great joy, the sun goes down – and sorry to tears. Because the day he became, in the absence of their lives, living someone else’s – found notes, letters, postcards, ads, it is merging with one, entering into dialogue with others, combining them all into a long, poetic text. Anger and bitterness comes when there is nothing new.

My father drank. He was an alcoholic, and he beat my mother. She had a good right hook, but after his first stroke, she fell to the floor. We must pay tribute to my old man, he never kicked her. More than two times. More than two times.

My grandfather brought his fears to the Second World War and handed over to my father. My father gave them to me. For me, this relay will end. For me, this relay will end.

When a long time did not come across as if suspended dialogue with life – comes despair, Keith feels lonely and insignificant. And here he throws the truck and walked around some overgrown with weeds flower beds, cutting tight circles. This part of the monologue was stronger Hamlet.
… this huge vagina sky … How do you want to plant it by the throat …

Even more impressed with the place where he was – sitting on his lap, turning the earth and to history itself, is thinking (no, it’s too slippery word for the act of accommodation, fusion with the spoken) about the conquest of the island of Britain, though single-handedly carrying the blame for the destruction of those who were connected with her blood, for the current indifference … In general, do not convey. Strongly.

It is unlikely we will ever see him on TV or on video, though he took the top prize at the International Film Festival in Anchorage in 2008. And this film at the festival from year to year it is a lot of such cinema.

Thank you, that it was.

Keep the streets nice & clean...

photo by Ingrid Veninger, Canada 2009 <www.onlythemovie.com>

I am a part time teacher and every now & then an ex-student of mine is compelled to leave a comment or rant on this blog (&/or on our Streetsweeper myspace &/or facebook pages [yes, I know]) and more often than not the comment has very little or nothing to do with Streetsweeper. Ironically, quite often it’s the students who I found most “unteachable”, &/or disrespectful in the classroom, who seem most compelled to try & communicate with me now in the ‘real’ (?) world’: but it’s too little too late.

I do hope I have managed to teach them something and I wish all my ex-students good luck and I hope they find happiness: but I do not take any credit or responsibility for any of the work (good or bad) that any of them might produce. It’s up to them. NM

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.

Streetsweeper is screening twice in Newcastle in August:

TUESDAY NIGHT 11th AUGUST

Front Room Art Gallery, Hunter Street TAFE, Newcastle.

THURSDAY NIGHT 13th AUGUST

Suspension Cafe, Beaumont Street, Islington.

…before going to Vladivostok USSR in September.

Streetsweeper is in yet another International Film Festival, more news soon.