Director: Beck Cole
Starring: Shai Pittman, Marcia Langton, Quinaiha Scott, Bruce Carter, Pauline Whyman, Vanessa Worrall and Tanith Glynn-Maloney.
Distributor: Transmission Films
Runtime: 91 mins. Reviewed in Nov 2011

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Rating notes: Mature themes, sex scene and coarse language

With the release of Mad Bastards, Australian audiences have had the opportunity to respond to a story about an aboriginal man who has deserted his wife and son, spent time in prison, who decides to travel north from Perth and find his son. The boy is being cared for by his wife’s father, the local policeman. We are invited to share the life of a man who has experienced hard times, much of it his own fault. We are asked to share his re-awakening concern for his son and his being a father.

Here I Am has many parallels with Mad Bastards: parent, separation, fault and responsibility, the grandparent brining up the child, the desire for a new start and to see the child again. But, this film offers a woman’s point of view.

In fact, most of the principal film-makers are woman. The writer-director, making her first feature, is Beck Cole. Karen is played by Shai Pittman. Much of the success of the film is due to Pittman’s strong screen presence, a woman who has the potential to be liked despite her flaws. She is in every scene. We are apprehensive that she is going to fail again. We watch her make more mistakes. But we cannot doubt her great desire to see her little daughter. The scene where they do meet under kind supervision but with the hostility of the grandmother and an accident requiring time in hospital has its moving moments.

Another strength of the film is the presence of well-known and admired activist Marcia Langton as Karen’s mother. She is a reformed alcoholic who has become the sternest of women, seemingly unforgiving and rearing the little girl.

Karen has a room in a women’s shelter in Port Adelaide. The characters who live there are well drawn, move beyond the stereotypes of women in trouble, even though they share many characteristics of the stereotype. We come to know their stories better.

Men seem to be mostly absent from the film. There is a white man who picks up Karen at a pub. There are two sympathetic aboriginal men, one of whom befriends Karen, speaks honestly to her and could be around when she finds her feet.

There is depth of feeling underlying this film. The naturalistic photography becomes poetic at times with the Port Adelaide skylines, with Warwick Thornton (Beck Cole’s husband and director of Samson and Delilah) as director of photography. We feel we have walked the streets with Karen at the opening of the film. We have lived at the shelter. We get to know the neighbourhood, the cemetery, and feel that we begin to understand these characters well – although some of the performances are awkward and some delivery sounds amateurish but most of us would be prepared to make allowances and respond to the meaning and challenges of the film.