But does Australian film know this? Lately, TN - lynx-eyed in all things theatrical - has noticed that a number of theatre artists are quietly invading the hallowed realms of cinema. But they're not jumping up and down at the edge of the crowd shouting "Me! Me! Pick me!" like Donkey in Shrek. No, these theatrical types - used perhaps to the unglamorous task of getting the job done with almost no money - are just getting out there and doing it. Instead of blinking in the headlights of an industry that wants to turn Australian films into a low-rent version of Hollywood, or buckling under a bureaucracy that panics at any sign of artistic seriousness or originality, they are making their own rules.



It's traditional for film types to scoff at the theatre, but these people are winning prizes and plaudits. There's Chunky Move's utterly charming 10-minute documentary, Dance Like Your Old Man, directed by choreographer Gideon Obarzanek, which has so far taken home three "best documentary" prizes, beginning with the Melbourne International Film Festival gong. There's Mark Constable, a fine theatre actor and director, who took the second prize at Tropfest recently with his self-written, self-acted, self-directed (and self-funded) short film Uncle Jonny.

And there is local Dogme-style auteur Oscar Redding, whose astonishing version of Hamlet, shot at night in the mean streets of Melbourne, opens next week at the CUB Malthouse. I hope that you've booked your tickets: this will be a rare chance to see this film, which evolved from an equally astonishing Poor Theatre production performed in a Northcote shop front in 2004. It premiered at last year's MIFF, creating a lot of excitement - at least among theatre types - but you can be sure that, given the nervousness of Australian film distribution, it won't be coming to a cinema near you. Fortunately for those who like their Shakespeare hot, the Malthouse is briefly turning the Tower Theatre into a boutique cinema and giving it a season. If you missed it first time around, now is your chance.

And now, via Oscar Redding again, I've encountered Hell's Gates. Redding's involvement this time is as an actor and script adviser; the film is actually the brainchild of Jonathan Auf Der Heide, who took time out of a career as an actor - I first saw him, as a very young actor, in the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project - to study film directing at the Victorian College of the Arts. Hell's Gates is his graduating film, and - wholly deservedly - scored the three top prizes for his year.

It's fair to say it's brilliant. It's based on a very grim true story: an escape from the notorious penal colony of Port Arthur by eight convicts, who struck out with limited food supplies across the wilds of Tasmania and, unable to feed themselves off the land, ended up eating each other. I first read this story in Robert Hughes's history of convicts, The Fatal Shore, and at the time I wondered why no novelist or playwright or artist had tackled it. It's as dramatically intense as anything out of Dostoevsky, it has the murderous absurdity of Kafka and the bloody logic of a Webster revenge tragedy, and it's wholly our own. (Bizarrely enough, ABC-TV is making a documentary re-enactment of this story as well: it must have struck its time.)

I'm told the short film was made for a grand total of $13,000. I don't know how Auf Der Heide and his crew conjured such breathtakingly lush cinematography out of their minimal budget - the film includes panoramically brooding landscape shots worthy of Planet Earth, and has a visual depth and clarity that you associate with infinitely more expensive productions.

It's also beautifully acted (the cast features some notable theatre actors, including Greg Stone, Oscar Redding and John Francis Howard), beautifully scripted and beautifully edited, and features a haunting score by theatre composer Jethro Woodward. It's not hyperbole to say that this genuinely poetic film recalls Werner Herzog (it bears affinities with Aguirre: The Wrath of God, but lacks Herzog's Eurocentric shonkiness), or that in its poetic rhythms, particularly in how it makes landscape a character in the film, it has qualities you see in the work of Andrei Tarkovsky or Terrence Malick.

And it consciously reaches towards Senecan tragedy - the film opens with a startling and blackly ironic quote from a 1786 edition of the London Morning Post: "This thief colony might hereafter become a great empire, whose nobles will probably, like the nobles of Rome, boast of their blood". With neither false drama nor rhetorical bombast, but rather a poetically-inflected, unflinching realism, it unfolds a bleak fable about the self-devouring nature of colonialism. In short, it's the kind of thing that makes TN's heart beat fast with excitement.

However, in the space of 20 minutes Auf Der Heide can only tell part of the story. So cast and crew are off to the wilds of Tasmania in July, in a quest which seems to this soft-skinned urbanite to be of almost Quixotic difficulty, to shoot the feature-length version on a laughably tiny budget. I wish them luck; if the resulting feature bears out the promise of the short, this will be a film to watch out for. Whether such a film can make any purchase in the current context of the Australian film industry remains to be seen. I don't doubt I'm partial, but I think that the local film industry has largely forgotten that film can also be an art. Maybe these theatre types will jog its memory.

Video: Trailer for Hell's Gates