Thursday 14 October 2004

BOB CONNOLLY

Bob will be reading segments of his soon to be published book 'Black Harvest, Filmmaking in the Papua New Guinea Highlands' (working title) and illustrating the readings with excerpts from his and his late partner, Robin Anderson's, film, Black Harvest. There will also be a question and answer session.

"The experiences Bob and Robin had while making Black Harvest were both hair-raising and extraordinary. Bob has read segments to me and I was on the edge of my seat almost the entire time. I wanted to hear more and more. This is a rare opportunity to listen to the intimate and complicated details of the filmmaking firsthand and then actually see what he is talking about." Pat Fiske

Bob Connolly: "Fourteen years ago in 1990 Robin Anderson and I shot a feature length documentary in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. To do so, we lived for a year in a grass hut 20 miles west of Mount Hagen. For much of it we were caught up in a tribal war, with widespread property destruction and heavy loss of life. While the small European population in the Highlands lived predominantly behind barbed wire and armed guard security in Mount Hagen, we were out in the open, on our own with a two-year old daughter.

Robin and I lived and worked together for 24 years. I wanted to write about why and how we did what we did, and in many ways Black Harvest is the most suitable vehicle. By 1990 we had been working in the Highlands for a decade. Black Harvest was our third and last filming venture there and was our most successful internationally. Shooting it, we fully evolved our own particular style of observational narrative filmmaking.

The idea for this book came to me a few weeks after Robin died. I was clearing out a whole lot of film stuff in our attic and came across a diary Robin wrote during the year we spent shooting Black Harvest. I also wrote dozens of letters from the field to family and friends, and I was able to get most of those back. There were six hours of interviews that Tim Bowden did with us not long after we got back to Sydney for his radio series on us called 'Big Men and Broken Dreams'. So I had all that plus the film transcripts, notes, interviews I've done since which constitutes my source material.

The book is intended for a general audience. I've tried to write a lively account of what it's like to live and film for a year in a remote location among tribal people. It is a warts and all portrait and will be published by ABC Books next year. It also forms the basis of an MA Honours degree I'm doing at AFTRS."

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