Putuparri and the Rainmakers tells the story of Tom Lawford (brother of Last Cab‘s Ningali Lawford-Wolf), whose people are known as the rainmakers of the desert.
The film’s Chinese-Australian director, Nicole Ma, started her career 25 years ago as a producer in New York.
“I was doing music videos and concert films”, she said. “Then I moved to LA and did location managing for big features, but I didn’t really like that. I came back to Australia around 1998, and started to learn how to make documentaries. I began working in museums, doing multimedia exhibitions. From there I started making longer films”.
“I first went to Fitzroy Crossing in WA in 2001, and worked with the community making films about social issues, like family violence, that are occurring there”.
“I was introduced to Spider and Dolly, Tom’s grandparents, at the Arts Centre. I pitched a film idea to them, and they weren’t very interested in what I was proposing. But they were going back to their country at the time. They hadn’t been back for a long time, and they wanted someone to film it, so they asked me if they wanted to go with them. I followed them to Kurtal and made a little film for the ABC. That’s how it all started”.
Originally a one-woman unit, Ma enlisted cinematographer Paul Elliot in 2008.
“I started to seriously think about how I was going to make the film. I had all this footage, hundreds of hours, and wanted to sculpt something out of it. I needed better-shot footage, to embed within the cinema-verite that I was shooting myself”.
From the first visit in 2001, it took Ma until July last year to complete the film, which was one of numerous side projects.
“I would go back to Fitzroy Crossing at least once a year, sometimes for a few months of the year. I was doing various projects for museums and exhibitions that involved the family and a lot of other prominent artists and people in the region”.
Putuparri‘s eventual star Lawford, a taciturn man with a history of domestic abuse and a problem with alcohol, remained an elusive figure. “Tom was always on the outskirts. He was a bit suspicious of me in the beginning, because he was wondering why I kept coming back”.
“The structure was quite hard to form. I tried various different storylines to hook the story on to and eventually I realised I needed one character to guide the audience through it, and I needed a character who was dramatic.
“Tom’s pretty dramatic, and he has a foot in two worlds – the traditional world and the modern world as well, so there’s a conflict there. Eventually I had to approach him to ask him if he’d be willing to be my main character” – a task the filmmaker describes as a “daunting experience”.
After many short-form factual films, Ma “wanted to make this one long-form because there was so much footage and I wanted to make it an experiential experience, and the only way to do that is in the cinema”.
After premiering at MIFF last year, the film has had theatrical runs in Perth and at Cinema Nova in Melbourne, where it ran for three months.
“Generally people feel they’ve been let in to a world they haven’t seen before. A lot of people said to me it was the first time they’d seen the connection our indigenous people have with their country in a visual way, rather than it just being told to them”.
“They’ve experienced the country with the custodians of that country. Tom’s family is famous for being rainmakers in the desert, and we actually had original footage of that happening. I think it profoundly moves people”.
Putuppari will have its Sydney premiere on February 10 at Event Cinemas, George St, before heading to Canberra, where the film will screen as part of the National Museum of Australia’s Encounters exhibition.
Ma will then return to Sydney for a special screening at the Casula Powerhouse as part of this year’s Blake Prize, for which Lawford is nominated.
Putuparri and the Rainmakers is screening via Tugg Australia, the cinema on demand platform. IT will also be shown on NITV on March 13 at 9.30pm.
Tugg allows audience members to host one-off screenings of independent movies at their local cinema; selling tickets via their social media channels.
Each ‘citizen promoter’ gets to keep 5% of the box office.