Under the Bridge (2015)

Early one Friday morning Alexandra Mitchell, a 32 year old anti-feminist lesbian, picks up her new girlfriend Elle and drives over eight-hundred kilometres from her one-bed one-bath one-car apartment in Newtown to Arlington Retreat, a mud-brick cottage at the end of a twenty-two kilometer dirt track situated deep in the sub-tropical rainforest of Northern NSW, Australia. It is the home of her older sister Genevieve. It is late summer 2003: floods, droughts, bushfires, humidity, insects. The sisters haven't seen each other in a long time, but the legacy that binds them is ever present and made all the more inescapable now that Alex is writing a book; their stories, her book. The girls' father as remembered, looms large. His influence is indelible and their recounting of him, a purging. In order for the sisters to heal, these stories have to be told, people remembered, the past dredged, and as facilitated by the book the there and then is awakened in the here and now. What unfolds over the span of one evening is a moving and intimate storybook telling of the lives of these two sisters. It is a shared, yet disparate view of a long-ago journey from a bleak and cold English winter into the warmth but uncertain milieu of Australian suburbia; a journey forced upon them by the simple nature of belonging to one family, a small clan of ten-pound Poms. Part fairytale, part heightened realism... under the bridge transcends the Drama genre by infusing a child-like naivety alongside the oft-times harsh hostility of human existence. It explores themes of rejection, love, loss, dysfunction, sexuality, shame, expectations and isolation, but it is ultimately about reconciliation. If blood is thicker than water, then the stains that are left from a lifetime of shared battles are much harder to wash away. But this is Australia, and when it rains, it rains hard. Along with the disruption that comes with a deluge there is the replenishing, cleansing and driving powers of the water that flows... under the bridge.