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 has been invited to the Vladivostok International Film Festival! The festival is called “Pacific Meridian” and is a survey of films from Asian Pacific countries. It looks pretty cool, they do the whole red carpet thing, and also have more interesting programming in which our film will screen. It feels very exotic and exciting to screen at one end of the Trans Siberian railway in Russia. First the Alaskans wanted us, now the Russians. I might brush up on the Cyrillic Alphabet, just in case. TR

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

I’ve finally started making some short films out of the video I shot whilst in Anchorage for the Film Festival. Here’s film number one:

A Streetsweeper In Alaska December 2008

NM

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