Kristen McLennan warmly greets her chickens first thing. “Good morning girls,” she says. Then, picking one up: “Hey, little one. You laying me any eggs today?”
Her family farm in Kangaroo Valley, inland from Kiama, has 16,000 free-range chickens supplying eggs to Sydney and the state’s South Coast. And while they are far from pets, McLennan has found them friendly enough.
“When you enter the paddock they just come on over and say ‘good morning’,” she says. “They’re very noisy and very happy to see us.”
McLennan has found chickens have quirky personalities.
“They’re very funny little things,” the former school teacher says. “They talk to you. If I’m just doing my thing, they can be relatively quiet.
“But as soon as I answer a phone call, I have to walk away from the chickens because they respond to me when I’m talking. They start talking and they get really loud.”
McLennan and her chickens appear in a new documentary from Ian Darling (The Final Quarter, The Pool) that will have a world premiere at Sydney Film Festival in June. Called The Valley, it is a meditative and atmospheric look at the rhythms of daily life.
Darling says he has been visiting the area for 30 years – he is executive director of the Shark Island Institute, which holds artistic residencies for actors, artists, filmmakers, musicians and writers – and has always been struck by its natural beauty.
“When I was looking for a place to make a film around the themes of solitude and stillness, it seemed like a country community was the place to do it,” he says.
Darling and his crew spent 100 days filming in Kangaroo Valley, capturing the lives of farmers of different types, an artist, shopkeeper, police officer, newspaper delivery driver, baker, builder, footy coach, musicians, firefighters, cyclists, early morning walkers and many others.
“The thing I had no appreciation for was the amount of time people spend alone and in silence in country communities,” Darling says. “There was a real yearning to find a point of connection with the community.”
It was always intended to be a long film but festival-goers need to be prepared for a marathon Frederick Wiseman-style experience. The acclaimed American director’s cinema verite, or observational documentaries, on such subjects as a community in New York, The National Gallery in London or a farming town in Indiana regularly ran to three or four hours without music or narration.
The Valley, also without music or narration, runs for three hours, which could be a challenge in the TikTok era of short attention spans.
“Right from the start, we thought, ‘let’s give this time’ so that audiences who are willing to go on the journey will really understand what solitude and silence is, and how powerful it can be,” Darling says. “For a festival audience, I’m hoping that they’ll be willing to sit in the dark, in relative silence, for a long period of time.
“But it’s a real escape from the madness we’re seeing in this outside world so I’m hoping it’s seen as a very healing experience for an audience.”
McLennan and many of the film’s other subjects plan to be at the screening at the festival, which runs from June 3 to 14.
“It was pretty cool to be part of it,” she says of the documentary. “But it was definitely a lot more complicated and difficult than I expected. I thought they’d be out there for 15 or 20 minutes, take a couple of shots, and that would be it. But it was significantly more involved than that.”
Happily, filming did not upset the chickens.
“The only time the chickens get upset is when someone flies a drone,” McLennan says. “They think it’s an eagle and they all go and hide in their trailers.
“But they quite liked the extra attention because when we were trying to get particular shots, they got all this extra feed to encourage them to stay.”
The first 13 films to be announced in the festival program are headed by Selina Miles’ Australian documentary Silenced, which follows Australian lawyer Jennifer Robinson’s work with sexual assault and abuse survivors including Brittany Higgins and Amber Heard, and Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire, a true-crime thriller set in the 1970s that stars Bill Skarsgård, Dacre Montgomery and Al Pacino.
Two music documentaries are bound to be popular: Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s Broken English is described as a loving tribute to celebrated British singer-songwriter Marianne Faithfull, who died in January; and Tamra Davis’ The Best Summer includes rediscovered performance and backstage footage of the Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth and Foo Fighters during Australia’s 1995 Summersault tour.
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