When Boreham first conceived the idea for his award winning short film Transient, he anticipated a film about ‘a heterosexual couple. They were Eastern European and holidaying in the Blue Mountains. The tension in the relationship would be revealed in their home movie’. Things changed a little along the way, and the film in its final form is about two gay men who fall in love in Vietnam. While abroad, the men keep their relationship a secret, only to return to the open world of Sydney and have it fall apart.
Transient premiered and won much praise at the Berlin Film Festival in 2005. Two years later, the short film has had an unusually long stay in the film circuit, recently showing at its 39th film festival in Newtown. Craig Boreham talked to OUTinPerth’s Megan Smith about the mainstream appeal and queer themes of Transient.
OiP: Why has Transient been such a successful short film?
CB: It is a bit more accessible than a lot of the stuff I’ve done. A lot of what I’ve done is very queer… mainstream festivals don’t like to go there. This one [Transient] seemed to sneak through because it was about lost love. Everyone has done that at some point. The feedback I get when people are watching it, especially straight audiences, is that they can relate to it on an emotional level.
OiP: Why don’t mainstream festivals ‘go there’?
CB: There is a network of [LGBTI] film festivals around the world, which plays into why some of the mainstream festivals don’t take the content. It is unfortunate because many gay films are only shown to gay audiences and don’t necessarily get out to the wider world. It reinforces the ghetto mentality a little bit.
OiP: The film is set between Vietnam and Sydney. Why did you choose those locations? What role did the locations play in the film?
CB: I was in Vietnam with my partner [Phoenix Leonard] and thought the landscape was amazing. So, I just started filming that footage, forcing him to be the other actor.
When the relationship was a secret it was really important [to the characters]. When they came back it was watered down in this culture of distraction… I wanted to look at Sydney and the community, the way gayness has evolved and become more accessible and consumable. The more that happens the more watered down our culture becomes. Especially in Sydney, there is a real culture of needing to not be monogamous, and this need to have no emotional attachment to partners. I think Sydney’s gay culture was a motivating factor in them falling apart.
OiP: Was it strange to act with your current partner in a film about a relationship falling apart?
CB: It was kind of weird. And I wondered, am I crashing our relationship by doing this? A lot of the stuff I thought about when we were making it was the little power plays that happen in relationships to undermine them and the way people abuse and take each other for granted in relationships.
OiP: At one point in the film the narrator refers to his relationship as a parody of heterosexual relationships. What role did the main characters’ sexuality play in the film?
CB: I think there are intrinsic differences in how we [gays] have our relationship and that line was about that. It was more motivated by the character than gay relationships. I don’t think that negates the fact that it could have been a hetero couple.
OiP: Why did you choose to do the whole of the film as an interior monologue?
CB: There were a lot of reasons, one of them being cost. Ideally I would have liked to play the film out as a drama. When I wrote it that way it became a much bigger script. Plus, all the stuff I shot in Vietnam was just images. I thought maybe it would be nice to have it all as a memory.
OiP: Was the narrator Ian Roberts the ex-footy player?
CB: Same Ian Roberts. He is now an actor. He read the script and really responded to it. We had a lot of actors audition for that part, but he just walked in and did it. It was good to be able to do that because we got filming from the NSW office (see name on film) so we had time to spend and get the right voice.
OiP: How has your own sexuality affected your career?
CB: It was a motivating force for me to want to tell stories. It was looking at our experiences as a community and not seeing them on screen. So, I do have a commitment to telling them.
Those interested in seeing the film, can visit Logo Online ( www.logoonline.com), MTV’s LGBT network in America. The film can be streamed from their short film section. For more on Craig Boreham, including his upcoming film Stray about homeless queer youth in Sydney, visit www.craigboreham.com.
