Rosemary Blight, of Goalpost Pictures Australia, is delighted to announce that The Eternity Man, the Julien Temple-directed film opera filmed in Sydney, has been selected to screen in the Piazza Grande at the Locarno Film Festival in Italy.
The Eternity Man is the first Australian film to screen in the Piazza Grande since Moulin Rouge in 2001. The Piazza Grande is an enormous Renaissance square in the centre of the Swiss- Italian town which accommodates over 7,000 viewers, with film’s projected nightly onto one of the largest screens in the world. The Festival opens on August 6 with a screening in the Piazza Grande of Julian Jarrold’s Brideshead Revisited.
The Eternity Man will be in contention for the inaugural Variety Piazza Grande Award, awarded by critics from Variety, and the Prix du Public UBS award.
Produced by Rosemary Blight (CLUBLAND, IN THE WINTER DARK) and John Wyver (GLORIANNA), The Eternity Man is based on an opera which premiered at the Almeida Theatre in July 2003 and at the Sydney Festival in 2005 to wide acclaim, and tells the story of Arthur Stace, who spent 40 years chalking a timeless message on Sydney’s streets: the single word, written in copper-plate, Eternity.
The film premiered with two special sell-out Opera House screenings at the recent Sydney Film Festival, and will also shortly play at the Melbourne International Film Festival.
The Eternity Man is a visually and musically-arresting journey into the grotty heart of Sydney; a place of black humour, alcoholism, bashings, love, sex, lies and shocking beauty. Stace is the archetypal outsider in the city; unobtrusive, distracted, flung from freak-show to brothel to Baptist church, revealing the secrets a city likes to keep to itself through the autistic repetition of a single gesture..
The Eternity Man brings together one of Australia’s most exciting international composers, Jonathan Mills, (now the director of the Edinburgh Festival), and the renowned Australian poet, Dorothy Porter (ELDORADO, THE MONKEY’S MASK), with director Julien Temple, whose film work, from THE GREAT ROCK AND ROLL SWINDLE to his most recent documentary JOE STRUMMER: THE FUTURE IS UNWRITTEN, has defined punk on the big screen. The Eternity Man was produced with the assistance of the Australian Film Finance Corporation, NSW Film & TV Office, ABCTV and Channel 4 UK.
Australian baritone Grant Doyle, now UK-based, plays Arthur Stace. Christa Hughes, a former member of indie Australian rock band Machine Gun Fellatio, plays Arthur’s sister Myrtle.
Goalpost Pictures Australia is an independent drama production company established by Rosemary Blight, Ben Grant, Kylie du Fresne and Cass O’Connor to produce film and television drama projects for the domestic and international markets.
The company’s current slate includes the feature film ELISE, starring Natalie Imbruglia, the telemovie SCORCHED for the Nine Network Australia, and the second series of the BAFTA-nominated and AFI-Award winning series LOCKIE LEONARD, also for the Nine Network.
[release from TM Publicity]