How Australia needs less Insta-celebs and more faces speaking to diversity

While the majority of television viewers were watching the latest batch of Insta-celebs laying tiles on The Block or Nigella Lawson devouring calories on My Kitchen Rules last Sunday night, I was one of a few thousand other viewers who caught a glimpse of Australia’s entertainment future, and it was great.

That glimpse came courtesy of the ABC, which aired the groundbreaking Australian film Here Out West.

Fresh faces, fresh content and a fresh approach. If you missed it, HOW is essentially a movie-length anthology of eight shorter interconnected stories set in the multicultural battler heartland of Sydney’s western suburbs melting pot. While the cast is ethnically diverse, its themes are universal: grief, love, acceptance, family, despair and joy.

There were no ethnic caricatures or predictable plots to be found. In a word: brilliant.

For two hours we were treated to a showcase of new acting talent as a parade of faces, accents and storylines, rarely seen on prime-time television, were given an opportunity to shine. Collectively, they presented a far more accurate, relevant and enthralling depiction of contemporary life in suburban Australia than anything being dished up on Neighbours or Home & Away.

HOW is well worth tracking down on iview. It covers a 24-hour period after a grandmother (the always excellent Genevieve Lemon) steals a baby from a hospital while babysitting a young Lebanese girl who speaks no English (played brilliantly by young Mia-Lore Bayeh). The events link a variety of other characters into the story, including a Chilean security guard (Christian Ravello), who writes poetry to get through his long shifts; a Kurdish musician (De Lovan Zandy), who has been offered a new job; a Filipino nurse (Christine Milo), who takes on an extra hospital shift; and a mother (Gabrielle Chan) and daughter (Jing-Xuan Chan) on the closing night of the family’s long-running suburban Chinese restaurant.

This parade of new and fresh talent is a welcome injection into multicultural Australian popular culture, which for the large part is still dominated by formulaic reality TV show meltdowns and the same Nicoles, Cates, Margots, Hughs, Russells, Kylies et al. who have been bathed in the limelight for decades.

Last year, Arka Das, one of the many stars and writers of Here Out West, told the Herald’s film writer Garry Maddox about the inspiration for the film, which opened the Sydney Film Festival: “Eight of us had these loosely connected ideas of western Sydney and about place and family and belonging and how we wanted this new generation of migrant stories to be told and how we wanted to change the Australian cinema landscape because we felt it was always showing the same thing. It was always tales about refugees or downtrodden immigrants.”