At the online Sydney Film Festival 2020 - A recommendation to see Allison Chhorn's THE PLASTIC HOUSE (Australia, 2020)

Allison Chhorn

Let me digress just a little. For the last few years, in the face of much official indifference, the indefatigable Bill Mousoulis and Chris Luscri have waged a two person battle to bring local low-budget independent production to audiences. Their Unknown Pleasures screenings in Melbourne, showing the new and the old, are already becoming legend. Earlier this year, before the COVID-19 lockdown, there were screenings of Dave Jones Yaketty Yak and Dirk de Bruyn’s Conversations with my Mother. In 2019 there were 16 screenings of movies by Matthew Victor Pastor & Lisac Pham, John Hughes, Bert Deling, Ian Bonner, Anna Kannava, Chris Windmill, Matthew Rooke, James Clayden, Solrun Hoaas, Donna McRae, David Perry, Timothy Spanos, Marie Craven, Mark La Rosa and Gillian Leahy. Tremendous and you have to think these are guys who followed the Melburnian John Kennedy spirit "Do Something!!!" 

I say all this because another who has come out of that fiercely independent world is Allison Chhorn, whose new film The Plastic House, produced, directed, written and edited by Allison, with the aforementioned Chris Luscri as Executive Producer, is screening in the 2020 online version of the Sydney Film Festival and I cant urge you strongly enough to see it.  

The press notes I’ve been sent tell us that Allison Chhorn was born in Adelaide, Australia to Cambodian migrant parents. She holds an Honours Degree in Visual Arts from UniSA.

As a film-maker and multi- disciplinary artist incorporating video, installation, photography, painting and music composition, Chhorn’s work explores themes of migrant displacement, trauma and the repetition of memory through screens of visual media.

From 2014-17, she collaborated
with writer-director Mike Retter as producer, co-writer and editor of the feature films STANLEY’S MOUTH (2015) and YOUTH ON THE MARCH (2017), as well as crafting a solo body of work comprising numerous short films, site-specific digital installations and video essays.

Chhorn’s film work has screened
at Visions du Réel in Switzerland, the Sydney Film Festival, Adelaide Film Festival, OzAsia Festival, FELTspace, SASA Gallery and the North Bellarine Film Festival. Her most recent film is the acclaimed docu-fiction hybrid THE PLASTIC HOUSE.

So next up is the online Sydney Film Festival, a tough gig to attract interest it has to be said. The Plastic House  is competing for the Documentary Australia Foundation Award and all the SFF details are to hand, including purchasing a ticket if you click here

The Plastic House

When I had a chance to see a copy of the film via a Vimeo link, it took me quite by surprise. Ostensibly a film about a family struggling to run a business growing string beans in a greenhouse, the film starts with enigmatic images registering the deaths of a father and mother before beginning to follow the quotidian life of their daughter over the course of more than a year – planting, tending, cultivating, picking, repairing the greenhouse plastic cover, watching the weather blow it all away, and, at night, living quietly but worrying about the possibility of her house falling apart. Think the allusive deadpan images of Chantal Akerman that you have to wring the meaning out of.

Let's make it clear we’re not talking fly on the wall cinema verite observation. In fact, the film might well be regarded as fiction – sequences staged by the director, mostly acted alone  and distanced by the young woman. It is enigmatic, poetic, opaque and stunningly shot by the director herself to accentuate all those qualities via a ravishing set of images. 

To give you a bit more background here’s what Allison Chhorn says about her film:

Fear

This film was driven by two fears, both of which are still very real.

Firstly, as my family are getting older, I constantly fear the death of my parents and what it would be like if they weren’t here anymore. I think about their absence and how I would live emotionally and practically without them.

I experience their absence from time to time, when they go back to Cambodia – the absence of my mother’s voice, the absence of my father’s labouring work. Thinking – who would take over the farm if they were gone?

The other fear is the roof of my house collapsing on me. Seemingly irrational, yet the signs of cracks in the roof and pieces of ceiling that have fallen have made this possibility all too real. What if I didn’t do anything to fix it, but rather let it happen and carried on with what I knew?

Imagining these two fears was the idea for the story of the film.