Leila McDougall is sitting in Campgrounds on Peel Street with her mother – two generations of Walcha farming women sharing a coffee. Tamworth’s a stop on McDougall’s whirlwind promotional tour of her film Just A Farmer – a tender, realistic meditation on farmer suicides and its effects on those it leaves behind. It follows the journey of Alison, a farming woman who’s left alone to manage the farm, her kids, and their life after her husband, Alec, takes his own life.
It’s a film designed to spark conversation, first and foremost, about a subject that’s taboo, and is even more timely as farmers all over Australia are fronting the Supermarkets Inquiry and detailing just how hard it is to make a living feeding a hungry nation and, increasingly, the world.
Farming is the art of figuring out how to do more with less, and how to do many things at once. And with that attitude and experience, Leila set out to make her film. Making a film in Australia is hard enough to properly – within the confines of the grants system and the various film finance corporations, but to simply go out and do it is nearly impossible.
Just A Farmer is an independent movie, in the truest sense of the term, almost bordering on guerilla filmmaking.
“We got zero funding from anyone,” Leila says, referring to traditional grants and funding.
“My husband and I have mortgaged our property. And I’ve got a friend who sort of gave us a loan to get it made.”
A big contributor was Thomas Foods, the massive meat processor, whose support almost felt “too easy”, according to Leila, who was used to begging.
“Once they heard about the film the message, within a couple of days, they were on board. Darren Thomas, the owner, he’d lost a lot of friends to suicide. He was just like ‘Here you go’.”
The $200,000 Thomas gave, Leila notes, just about covered the accommodation costs for booking out a local motel for the seven weeks of shooting. Other cast and crew were billeted with friends around the town of Ararat, Victoria, where Leila lives and farms with husband Sean, who spent many an hour rearranging hay bales to make it look a certain time of year.
There was creative freedom in independence, not being beholden to any committees or financing bodies, Leila says.
“We’ve been able to make a film that’s real and authentic, without being told you have to have this in it, you have to have that in it.”
Leila and Sean’s farm serves as the set. Both her horse and her poddy calf get starring roles. It’s the McDougall’s sheep, cattle, shearing sheds in the film. The Holden Rodeo in the film is the one she learned to drive in.
The landscape, Leila states, is as much character itself, with cattle and sheep mustering playing out on top of green paddocks, with distant yellowed hills in the background offering a real sense of place.
The casting is similarly eclectic, with some big names of Australian film and TV scattered throughout a raft of first-timers – including Leila herself as protagonist Alison.
“I was like ‘Oh my god, should we get a real actress to play Alison?’”
The film’s director – Simon Lyndon, an actor who’s been everywhere from Terrence’s Malick’s The Thin Red Line, alongside Eric Bana in Chopper, and on TV’s Mr Inbetween, with Just A Farmer his first time directing a feature-length film – said no.
“He’s like ‘No. Because then I’d have to teach an actress how to be a farmer. Now I’m just teaching a farmer how to be an actor – much easier.’”
There’s a scene where Alison and Alec, played by Joel Jackson (Peter Allen: The Boy Next Door, Mystery Road), work side-by-side at the sorting table during shearing, and it’s clear that NIDA teaches many things, but not how to skirt a fleece. Leila’s farming background brings an easy grace and authenticity to the role – after all, how long would it take an actress to learn how to ride bareback with a rope bridle?
Leila’s daughter Vivian plays Alison’s daughter Sally, and Oliver Overton – Eric in the film – was a kid she used to babysit in Walcha. Husband Sean has a cameo as a young version of Owen, Alec’s father.
Owen is played by Longmire’s Robert Taylor, doing a masterful job of playing an ageing pisshead, someone who’s more hindrance than help at times – trying to help Alison pick up the pieces. Damian Walshe-Howling plays the sort of vaguely ne’er-do-well farmhand who keeps properties going all over the country.
Trevor Jamison, of Storm Boy and Cleverman, plays a rare example, in Australian cinema, of an Indigenous man in a position of authority as the school principal, who reaches out to Alison.
“That is true colour blind casting. He’s not playing, as bad as it sounds, the typical Indigenous guy (in popular culture). He’s a man of integrity, authority.”
The film is bookended with numbers for mental health helplines like Lifeline and Beyond Blue. This is a movie that wears its heart on its sleeve, because by social convention its characters cannot. This is the film’s intention: to empathise, and spark a conversation around farmer suicide. Leila drew on her years working in mental health spaces; her charity, Mellow in the Yellow, has raised $61,000 over the past eight years for rural mental health.
For rural viewers, and farmers especially, the authenticity is there: flicking-through late-night, past-due bills. Putting down livestock. Shifting hay and weekend footy.
The film is spartan, but by design, conveying a sense of numbing grief and silence that hits after a farm suicide, and the withdrawal the people the suicide victim leaves behind. Lyndon is not afraid to let a shot breathe, hold a scene for longer than the viewer might expect.
It’s a film worth seeing, but getting it seen has been challenging, even with personal endorsements from big names like Joel Edgerton and Hugh Jackman.
“I literally rang every cinema in the country, trying to get on screens,” she says.
“I’ve had to self-distribute.”
So far metro cinemas are refusing to screen it, but Leila remamins hopeful.
The production team has submitted the film to the Cannes Film Festival, and Berlin’s Sundance for international recognition, and there’s talks with the streaming services.
“But we need to get the right price.” Like farming, this film was built on debt as much as determination.
“Or, you know, I’ll just go on the road with it for 12 months, and go to little regional communities all over the place.”
“I had a man in Broken Hill, in his seventies, crying after the screening, saying ‘I haven’t cried in twelve years – I feel seen.’”
Still, she’s upbeat. “If it saves one life, it’s worth it.”
But with relentless optimism, Leila’s already thinking about her next project – one about Epona, the Celtic goddess of horses, and another one much closer to home: The Widow Of Walcha.
“I grew up with Mathew Dunbar,” Leila says, “I’m trying to get hold of Emma Partridge, who wrote The Widow Of Walcha.”
“I’d love to turn that into a TV series.”
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