Tom Zubrycki

Tom Zubrycki (born in London, England, in 1946) is an Australian documentary filmmaker. He is "widely respected as one of Australia's leading documentary filmmakers", according to The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film.[1] His films on social, environmental and political issues have won international prizes and have been screened around the world.[2] He is an active member of the Australian Directors Guild and lectures in the Open Program of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School.[3]

Personal life and activities

Zubrycki was born in the UK. His father was Jerzy Zubrzycki, a university academic credited as one of the main architects of the Australian government’s policy on multiculturalism.[4]

Writing/directing career

The limits of the new video technology and his desire to reach wider audiences ultimately forced Zubrycki to switch to 16mm film and to feature-length documentaries. Using the networks developed while making these early videos, Zubrycki completed Waterloo in 1981. The film, which focused attention on the negative social impacts of Sydney's rapid urban development, won the prize for Best Documentary at the 1981 Sydney Film Festival.[5]

Zubrycki's films have a style that he has developed over the course of his career. The subjects of his documentaries are, on the most part, drawn from issues of the day, and personalised.[6] He usually works in a documentary or "observational style" and his films are narrative-based and character-driven. His first documentaries were stories that focused on the victims of Australia's rapid economic and social re-structuring. They included Kemira - Diary of a Strike (1984) about an underground colliery sit-in strike near Wollongong[7] which won an AFI Award for Best Documentary,[8] and Friends & Enemies' (1985) about a protracted and bitter union dispute in Queensland that saw the rise of the New Right in Australian politics.

In 1988, he was contracted by Film Australia to write and direct a documentary commissioned by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and funded by The Australian Bicentennial Authority. However, owing to an editorial difference between the filmmaker and the ACTU, the film Amongst Equals was never officially completed. Zubrycki claimed that he was forced to re-write history in accordance with the wishes of key ACTU officials who wanted to de-emphasize direct industrial action as a way of improving wages and conditions.[9][10]

In the late 1980s, Zubrycki made two documentaries in Broome, Western Australia: Lord of the Bush (1990), a bio-pic about eccentric British developer Lord Alistair McAlpine and his plans to create a new ‘civilization’ in Australia's north; and Bran Nue Dae (1991), about the first Aboriginal musical written and performed in Australia. The documentary featured the indigenous playwright Jimmy Chi.

In the early 1990s, Zubrycki's focus turned to migrant and refugee families, and the stresses caused by cultural conflict, and the search for identity and home. In 1993, he completed Homelands about an El Salvadorean refugee family and the anatomy of a marriage under stress.[11] This was followed by Billal (1995), a documentary that followed the dramatic aftermath of a racially motivated incident involving a Lebanese teenage boy and his family.[12]

Zubrycki was employed as a commissioning editor at SBS-TV in 1996/97, but quickly returned to directing, making The Diplomat (2000), about the former exiled East Timorese leader Jose Ramos-Horta and the final two years of his 25-year campaign to secure his homeland's independence.[13] The film won the 2000 AACTA Award for Best Documentary and Best Director.[8] The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film called it his most successful film.[1]

In 2003, he returned to Australia and made Molly & Mobarak, a story about a Hazara refugee from Afghanistan who finds work in an Australian country town and falls in love with a local schoolteacher.[14][15]

This was followed in 2005 by Vietnam Symphony, about how during the American War (aka Vietnam War) the Hanoi Conservatorium of Music - teachers and students - evacuated to a village where it continued to operate for five years. In 2007, he made Temple of Dreams about an Islamic Youth Centre in Lidcombe and its battle with the local municipal council that wants to shut it down.[16] In 2011, he completed The Hungry Tide, a personal story about the impact of climate change on the small Pacific nation of Kiribati,[17] which premiered at the Sydney Film Festival and screened in competition at IDFA.[18]

Producing career

In the early 1990s, Zubrycki started producing the work of emerging directors. One of the first films he produced was Exile in Sarajevo (1996), a personal story about the last of the Siege of Sarajevo during the Balkan war. The film won an International Emmy in 1998.[1]

In the following two decades Zubrycki worked as a mentor to many Indigenous directors, producing a mix of TV documentaries and features. These includes films like Stolen Generations (2000), an historical account of the policy and practise of removal of 'part-descent' Aboriginal children from their parents. Gulpilil - One Red Blood (2002) about the celebrated Indigenous actor. Other films included Intervention - Katherine NT, A record of the first year of The Northern Territory Emergency Intervention, and The Weather Diaries a mother's meditation on the future for her musician daughter in the shadow of the twin threats of climate change and mass extinction. Other notable features Zubrycki produced include The Sunnyboy (2013) about the enigmatic lead singer of the 1980s band Sunnyboys and his gradual recovery from schizophrenia, and Ablaze a film about Bill Onus – a heroic cultural and political figure who revived his people’s culture in the 1940’s and 50’s and helped ignite a civil rights movement that helped change the course of history for Indigenous Australians.

Films
  • 2023 Memory Film - a filmmaker's diary (83 min co-producer)
  • 2023 Kindred (92 min Producer)
  • 2023 The Carnival (88 mins, Producer)
  • 2022 Senses Of Cinema (88 mins, Co-Producer, Co-Director)]
  • 2022 My Rembetika Blues (83 mins, Producer)]
  • 2021 Ablaze (81 mins, Producer)
  • 2020 The Weather Diaries (88 mins, Producer)
  • 2018 Teach A Man To Fish (86 min, Producer)
  • 2017 Hope Road (103 mins, Director/Producer)
  • 2017 The Panther Within (52 mins, Producer)
  • 2013 The Sunnyboy (2013, Producer), official website
  • 2012: Light from the Shadows (26 mins, Producer)
  • 2011 The Hungry Tide (83 mins, Director/Producer)
  • 2009 Intervention - Katherine NT (56 mins, Producer)
  • 2008 Mad Morro (46 mins, Producer)
  • 2007 Temple of Dreams (89 mins. Director/Producer)
  • 2006 The Prodigal Son (28 mins, Producer)]
  • 2005 Vietnam Symphony (52 mins, Director/Producer)
  • 2003 Molly & Mobarak (85 mins, Director/Producer)
  • 2002 Gulpilil - One Red Blood (56 mins, Producer)
  • 2002 Making Venus (82 mins,Producer)
  • 2001 The Secret Safari (52 mins, Director)
  • 2000 Stolen Generations (56 mins, Producer)
  • 2000 The Diplomat (84 mins, Director)
  • 1998 Whiteys Like Us (52 mins, Producer)
  • 1996 Exile in Sarajevo (90 mins, Producer).
  • 1995 Billal (87 mins, Director/Producer)
  • 1993 Homelands (79 mins, Director/Producer)
  • 1991 Bran Nue Dae (55 mins, Director/Producer)
  • 1990 Lord of the Bush (55 mins, Director/Producer)
  • 1990 Amongst Equals (90 mins, Director/Producer)
  • 1985 Friends & Enemies (90 mins, Director/Producer)
  • 1984: Kemira - Diary of a Strike (62 mins, Director/Producer)
  • 1981: Waterloo (48 mins, Director/Producer)

Awards and honours

In 2010, the Australian International Documentary Conference presented Tom with the highest award for a documentary practitioner, the Stanley Hawes Award "in recognition of outstanding contribution to documentary filmmaking in Australia".[19] In his presentation he criticized the mainstream broadcasters ABC and SBS for commissioning factual programs that were format-driven and light in content. He called for a dramatic increase in Screen Australia's Signature Fund in order to finance documentaries that were not dependent on broadcaster commissions.

References
  1. Ramon Reichert (2013). "Australia". In Ian Aitken (ed.). The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film. Routledge. p. 56. ISBN 9781136512063.
  2. Tom Zubrycki, Australian Screen Online
  3. Directing Masterclass with Tom Zubrycki, Australian Film, TV and Radio School
  4. John Williams; John Bond (2013). The Promise of Diversity: The Story of Jerzy Zubrzycki, Architect of Multicultural Australia. Grosvenor Books Australia. Retrieved 15 November 2013.
  5. Sydney Film Festival Award Winners
  6. "On filmmaking, history and other obsessions" by Patrick Armstrong, Metro Magazine, Issue 144, 2006
  7. "Showing some fight: Kemira's challenge to industrial relations" by Rebecca Coyle & Lisa Milner pp 178 - 183, Metro Magazine 153, 2007
  8. Past AFI Award Winners Archived 19 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine, Australian Film Institute
  9. "ACTU seeks to suppress controversial film", Sydney Morning Herald, January 12, 1991
  10. The "Amongst Equals" is a collection of articles about the film history of the Australian Trade Union movement by Ann Curhtoys and Hall Greenwood in Filmnews, V.21 No.1 Feb 1991 5-7
  11. "Film captures revolutionary’s haunted past", The Australian, October 15, 1993.
  12. Deborah Hope, "How ethnic conflict left a young man with brain damage", Sydney Morning Herald, October 5, 1995
  13. Mary Debrett, "Reclaiming The Personal As Political", Metro Magazine, Issue 138, 2002
  14. Kate Nash, "Stealing Moments: Tom Zubrycki’s MOLLY & MOBARAK", Metro Magazine, Issue 165, 2011
  15. Sonia Tascon, "'I’m Falling in Your Love’: Cross-cultural Romance and the Refugee Film", Diasporas of Australian Cinema Archived 3 December 2013 at the Wayback Machine eds: Simpson, Murawska and Lambert. Intellect Press. 2009
  16. Susie Khamis, "Lebanese Muslims Speak Back: Two Films by Tom Zubrycki", Diasporas of Australian Cinema Archived 3 December 2013 at the Wayback Machine eds: Simpson, Murawska and Lambert. Intellect Press. 2009
  17. "The Hungry Tide". Review by Shweta Kishore in Metro Magazine, Issue 171, 2012
  18. "The Documentary as Privileged Access", Lumina journal, No 8, Australian Film, Television and Radio School. 2011
  19. “The Stanley Hawes Address”, in Lumina Journal No 3, Australian Film, Television and Radio School. 2010
  20. Stanley Hawes Award
  21. "Winners 2021 – Victorian Community History Awards". prov.vic.gov.au. 27 October 2021. Retrieved 27 October 2021.
  22. "Film Critics Circle of Australia Awards: Winners Revealed". 28 February 2023.

Selected readings
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