By Ethan Benedicto
Having that vision for a story is difficult to bring to life, but it came easily for Narre Warren North filmmaker Lily Lunder, whose short film was recently awarded at a Sydney film festival.
Alongside fellow director Koko Crozier, the duo have had a dream of bringing their aspirations to life, and so far, things are looking promising.
Their short film Stonewall gained recognition at the Sony Catchlight festival up north and garnered further traction after it played at the Melbourne Women in Film Festival in March.
According to Lily, for as long as she could remember, she’s “loved storytelling”.
“I was obsessed with writing stories, but I realised that when my dad told me when I was five or six, that my friends didn’t read, but they watched movies.
“So I was like, I have to tell stories in a way that I’m going to reach a lot of people, and I fell in love with it – from making those crappy little iPad films and so on.”
Lily and Koko met at film school, and after bonding through their love for everything film and movies, they began exploring their desire to tell stories.
This desire bloomed, with the duo starting off with smaller festivals and Lily reminiscing about their series of shoots at Lysterfield Lake, to eventually taking part in the Very Short Film Festival in Tasmania.
After their experience grew, they decided to dip their hands into feature films, and hence came The Offing, a coming-of-age psychological thriller about a young woman working on a farm after escaping an abusive cult.
“After The Offing, we did Stonewall, in a way to kind of just like keep the practice up because sometimes we can get really stuck and not move, not make things,” Lily said.
“So, we got our friends Claire and Thomas, and it was just the four of us, and we said, let’s go away for a weekend and make a film.”
Stonewall was based on a wide range of experiences, stemming loosely from both Lily’s and Koko’s past, and as a medium for the duo to “explore grief and the ideas of losing someone and coming to terms with your relationship with them”.
“We were both really interested in a mother-daughter relationship in the film, and I felt that that was a theme that kept coming up in a lot of our different works.
“We wanted to try something different and explore it (the theme) in a character-oriented way and really get into the psychology of this one specific character,” she said.
The five-minute short film explores the themes of loss, grief and acceptance, the longing for what once was, and navigating complex emotions, of an even more complex relationship.
Combining elements of cinematography to relay silent messages beyond the narration, the short delivered a powerful and gripping tale of a girl and her mother, utilising scenery and setting, lighting and sound, to capture the audience in a trance of sorrow, melancholy and peace.
The team chose the Pebble House in Tarnagulla, and its surrounding environment of a former, bustling mining town, set the perfect scene.
Speaking on conveying emotion, Lily said that her friend Claire’s “performance and her facial expressions were just so powerful”.
“Being able to discuss the character’s journey with her helped, but it was also the cinematography, and we put a lot of thought into the way it was framed with mirror shots and so on.”
Multiple instances in the film were shots that reflected the character through a mirror, a way that Lily said, was both symbolic and literal as a way of reflecting on her past.
Music also played a big role, the final touch per se, something that both she and Koko felt was missing, until it made itself present.
On the setting and the environment, Lily said that every part and shot was calculated, and that they were “pretty conscious when we were outside”.
“We tried to reflect how big and epic and grand these locations are, and the fact that there’s no one inhabiting them was definitely interesting.
“At its peak, there were thousands of people living there, and now it’s almost abandoned, and it mirrors the journey and feeling of loss that happens to the main character.”
Death was also a very conscious trope that Lily and the team incorporated, central to the character, it was the inevitable, the “memento mori” as she said, and a kind of “morbid appreciation of what you did have”.
“You have to always remember that you could lose something and that you could die or someone else could die, and it’s this morbid appreciation of it.
“Thinking about death is really sad, but it’s also weirdly empowering about your present because it allows you to really appreciate everything,” she said.
The title Stonewall itself serves both as a literal and symbolic meaning, with the pebbles in the house, but also the emotional tactic of stonewalling emotions, as a way to represent the character and her relationship with her mother.
“She felt as if there was a stone wall that she couldn’t break down, but also that her mum wasn’t fully letting her in.
“But at the end of the film, and through the character’s process of reflection, that wall has started to break down,” Lily said.
Moving back into real life, she said that the reception for the short was phenomenal, having already screened at two different film festivals, Lily, Koko, and the wider team have had some “really positive feedback” and that people were “quite moved by it”.
Touching on the duo’s techniques, Lily said that for her, the best filmmakers “wear their influence on their sleeves”, and that to encapsulate a wide berth of themes and incorporate them into their media, they too, consume the same wide berth of different media.
“We’re constantly watching movies and a lot of TV as well, I mean a lot of filmmakers are always referencing just films, but we love our TV you know?” she said.
“It’s the visual techniques or an idea that you’ll pull or get inspiration from films and shows; and I have a go-to, which is Mr Robot, but Sam Esmail, the director, just brings everything in a really interesting way.”
As of now, the duo are working on promoting The Offing, a project that has been in the works since their first year of university, with key filming locations that include Narre Warren North.
