Here Out West will premier on ABC TV, August 14, 8.30pm
A middle-aged white woman gets stuck babysitting a chirpy eight-year-old girl who only speaks Lebanese. The woman takes the girl with her to visit her daughter, handcuffed to a hospital bed. The woman, in a frantic decision, decides to kidnap her newborn granddaughter from the maternity ward, fearing she will never get to see her again.
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Thus starts Here Out West, a captivating feature film premiering on ABC TV on Sunday, August 14, that paints a canvas of the cultural differences and social connectedness of the peoples of western Sydney.
The woman's flight from the hospital with the baby in her arms and eight-year-old at her side sets off a chain of events that bring together complete strangers over the course of one dramatic day.
The film is split into eight distinctive parts, each created by a different writer, each segment focusing on a person of particular ethnic heritage and their personal situation. Cleverly, all eight segments are tied together by the cross section of people.
Bangladeshi. Kurdish. Chinese. Pakistani. Afghan. Vietnamese. Chilean. South African. Lebanese. Australian. Some immigrants. Some first generation Australian. Maybe not all so different as an outsider might think.
All part of the deeply woven, ever-changing cultural fabric of western Sydney.
For Arka Das, an actor, producer and writer, it was a dream film. He was a lead actor in one segment, Brotherhood, which he also wrote, and played a key role in the following segment, The Eternal Dance.
"You can be part of a lot of films, but only one or two come along that are super special," he says.
"It was special to me: I'm connected in so many ways. Writer. Creator. And actor. From my hometown.
"I speak my first language [Bengali] in the film. I love the team."
The film's concept came together with Das and seven other writers called into a room to get to know each other.
Das says of his segment, "It was never in my head".
"I brought my experience, my upbringing" to the session he says. Three months later, the writers came together and the "spine" of the film came together. The shooting script was ready a year later.
"Day one was spent chatting about our upbringing, pockets of my life. ... it developed it from there. It was a lot about friendship and loyalty and family. Perseverance and preservation of language. It organically developed."
The reality of the film: it's not full of violence or sex, the ingredients which sell so many movies these days.
"There is Implied violence, implied relationships, but not confrontational," Das says.
The film is split into eight parts, each created by a different writer, each focusing on a person of particular ethnic heritage and their personal situation.
"I think it comes from the idea that we didn't want western Sydney protracted the way media does. We wanted to find the heart and soul."
In The Eternal Dance segment, an old man lays dying in a hospital, one of his daughters by his side frustrated that she doesn't understand her father's words because he is speaking in his native tongue, Bengali. The woman, played by Leah Vanderberg, overhears a hospital visitor, Robi (played by Das), speaking the language and asks him to interpret what her father is saying.
Minutes later, she is singing a poem to her dad that she learned from family as a child, completely in Bengali. "It's a real song [Momo Chitte]," Das says. "By a Nobel laureate and poet [Robindranath Tagore]. It's a song about life and death. Leah sang it beautifully. "
The scenario, like so much of the movie, absolutely could happen in real life, Das says.
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