At the Randwick Ritz - LIFE CLASS - Tom Cowan releases his latest movie with "new music, new structure, new tone and focus. A bit more of the love story."

Old friend Tom Cowan (above, outside the Ritz) has been in touch to advise that he has now completed to his satisfaction a movie he began almost ten years ago. It's titled Life Class and it is having its premiere in a one off screening at the Randwick Ritz on Sunday 1 September at 4.30 pm. Tom has had a distinguished career as both a director (The Office Picnic, 1972, Promised Woman, 1975, Journey Among Women,1977, Sweet Dreamers 1982, Orange Love Story, 2004) and as a Director of Photography on Bonjour Balwyn, Pure Shit, Love Letters from Teralba Road, Mouth to Mouth, Winter of our Dreams and the hugely successful IMAX film Antarctica.

Life Class was filmed in 2016.  The movie is set in the 1920s, a war-shattered time of courageous strikes and sectarian violence - and one of the most adventurous in art.

A French artist escaping his trauma from the Great War tries to bring ‘art’ to a small country town. He is thwarted, not the least in finding a model who will shed her clothes for ‘art’. The model, Sadie, who agrees to the 2 shilling payment, a robust country girl, is far from the ones he studied in Paris and is almost too ‘natural’ for our hero.  The Temperance Society struggles to uphold decency and stop Sadie ruining her reputation.  Georges also has great difficulty controlling his feelings for his fiery model while instructing the locals in the principles of ‘art’. The would-be artists study the naked Sadie posing against a ghost gum. In their sun induced reveries, the imaginations of the artists float through the bush.  War, love and longing are released. Inflamed by Sadie’s nakedness, drunken locals led by a disturbed English returned soldier attack the class. The old Major, part of the sketching group, repels the attack and the louts retreat.  But the wounds of the war persist to keep Sadie and Georges apart. 

Here's Tom on the movie: "The idea came from the bush and wondering how we change our ways of being when we spend time in nature. 

"And I wanted to make a movie about perception: about what we first see, how that can change to seeing what is really there. If you have ever done a life drawing class you'll know what a challenge it is to perceive what is really there. Characters see the farm girl who becomes the model as being beyond redemption. There's a dose of misogyny. And the Frenchman is seen through xenophobic eyes.

"It was shot in the beautiful Bega valley. Natalie Miller called it 'gorgeous and endearing'. But looking at that first edit disappointed me and I had to have a go at doing justice to the material. So, eight years later: new music, new structure, new tone and focus. A bit more of the love story."

Tickets: One price for all $25. Available at the door or to buy in advance click through here

Repeating ....The Sydney premiere is on 1st September at 4.30 at the Randwick Ritz. ....anyone curious to know about the latest step in Tom's film-making career should be there....