Director offers tribute to oyster farming

Anna Reeves thinks the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales is amazing.

Anna Reeves is a proud New Zealander but that didn't stop her making a film that is a love letter to the Australian landscape.

Her new film The Oyster Farmer is a romantic drama set on the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales.

Reeves, 36, who lived in Australia for eight years but is now London-based, says she loved the landscape.

"I just thought the river was amazing and I couldn't believe that someone had never made a feature film on the river before," she said. "I don't see why foreigners can't write a tribute to a land that they have enjoyed and loved living in."

She saw her different perspective as an advantage and hired New Zealand cinematographer Alun Bollinger as the film's director of photography.

"I thought it would be a great asset to have someone look at the Australian landscape with me with a fresh eye."

It wasn't just the scenery she wanted to capture but the lifestyle of the oyster farmers and the Australian sense of humour.

"I love the Aussie sense of humour. I think they are incredibly mental and funny people ... they just have these hilarious terms of phrases and I just wanted unashamedly to celebrate that."

The story follows Jack Flange (Alex O'Lachlan) who moves to a small oyster-farming community to work and ends up committing a robbery using a frozen lobster as a weapon.

He sends himself a package containing the money, but it goes missing, which complicates his budding romance with local girl Pearl (Diana Glenn) whom he suspects stole it to sate her expensive shoe fetish.

The action carries on against the background of daily life on an oyster farm - a location and lifestyle Reeves grew interested in after overhearing a conversation between a man and his friends in Sydney.

"He was talking about how he was building a shack up the river. I asked what river it was and he said he had an eighth-generation oyster farmer as a neighbour who kept complaining about how he kept turning the radio up."

For a sixth-generation Taranaki woman, the idea of a family farming oysters for 200 years was compelling, Reeves said.

"I just found that quite extraordinary and I just got determined to go up this river."

Life in Taranaki prepared her for the venture.

"Growing up in Taranaki I knew lots of fishermen and heaps of sheep farmers and dairy farmers; and the oyster farmers were just like the farmers I'd grown up with except they were farming a crop that happened to go up and down beneath the tides.

"There was a similar sense of being connected to nature and the flow of nature, and I appreciated that."

The oyster farming community was comparable to a small Taranaki town and she was pleased to be accepted.

"They don't really like outsiders up this part of the river, it's a very isolated part of the river, and they need to trust you otherwise they would just make your life hell if you were making a film."

Bollinger's down-to-earth style was an asset - although his refusal to wear shoes apparently caused health and safety concerns.

"He was charging around on oyster shells with no shoes on, it was just hilarious," she said.

"If you had a really urban type of crew that went up a river like that, they wouldn't feel comfortable. I thought about that when I was selecting the crew.

"We had a lot of stresses with the location but we had a fantastic crew. It was a good experience."

Some stresses during the six weeks of shooting included 75 per cent of locations being inaccessible by road, fog, rapid tides and the half-hourly Sydney to Gosford train which proved a sound man's nightmare.

"We got stuck in the mud one day for six hours and no one could get to the loo boat - that was quite drastic."

Reeves, an Australian Film and Radio School graduate, has been called Australian in some media reviews and articles about the Oyster Farmer. But she is more bothered by being called British - a confusion possibly created by the film being co-produced by Australian and UK firms.

"It's more annoying to be called an English filmmaker when I've made such an obviously Australian film. Especially when it's being released in Australia, I worry people will say "I'm not going to see something a Pom has written about the Hawkesbury'."

Reeves lives in London with husband Frederic and their 14-month-old son Sebastien.

Her first short film La Vie En Rose won prizes, and she has made other shorts, but this is her first feature. She has written another script Aftertaste which she described as an "ode to Sydney" but intends setting her next film in Taranaki.

- NZPA