The Home Song Stories

Amanda Palmer and Director and writer of The Home Song Stories Tony Ayres

This week, The Fabulous Picture Show hosts a special screening of The Home Song Stories, an epic tale of mother and son, secrets and betrayal, and unrequited love. Screened in the Official Selection of numerous festivals including Berlin, Toronto and Edinburgh, this autobiographical film is being praised as a haunting and intensely powerful piece of cinema.

The Home Song Stories follows Tom, a writer who attempts to rediscover the love he once had for his mother by retracing the tumultuous events of his childhood. His mother, a glamorous Hong Kong nightclub singer named Rose Hong (Joan Chen in perhaps her finest performance), meets Australian sailor Bill and migrates with the children to Australia. But a week after marrying Bill, she leaves him for a series of affairs that trigger a tragic sequence of events.

Director and writer Tony Ayres joins Amanda Palmer to talk about how he brought to life his childhood memories of displacement, isolation and the Chinese diaspora.

Lust, Caution

Lust, Caution

Based on a short novel by Eileen Chang, Lust, Caution is set during Japan’s wartime occupation of China. It is about an innocent young actress recruited by the resistance to seduce an important collaborator.

The film marks the Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s return to Chinese-language drama after several English-language films, including Brokeback Mountain, which won Lee the Oscar for Best Director. His previous Mandarin foray, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, is America’s all-time most successful foreign film.

In a candid interview, Amanda Palmer meets Ang Lee and his cast to talk about why the director’s films tend to focus on repressed emotions, and how he convinced his leading actress to trust him with the explicit scenes in Lust, Caution.

Leila Khaled: Hijacker

Palestinian Leila Khaled

Leila Khaled: Hijacker is a documentary about Palestinian Leila Khaled who, at the age of 24, became the first woman to hijack an airplane – and then hijacked another one a year later.

Directed by Swedish Palestinian Lina Makboul, the film explores the thin line between terrorist and freedom fighter. But it is also a personal journey for Makboul as she meets her childhood hero, and finds out whether she still measures up.

Makboul talks about what led her to make a film on Leila Khaled, and how notions of terrorism have changed over the years.

A Sudanese Les Miserables

Gadalla Gubara and his daughter Sarah

The Fabulous Picture Show travels to Sudan to meet the incredible Gadalla Gubara and his daughter Sarah. Sarah is Sudan’s first female film director, and Gadalla, one of Africa’s pioneering filmmakers, is 87 years old and now blind.

They have just completed an adaptation of the classic 19th century French novel Les Miserables, set in modern-day Sudan. A tribute to the enormous struggle of the Sudanese people against injustice and poverty, the film is about a desperately poor man who commits a minor theft and is punished without compassion.

The Fabulous Picture Show speaks to the unusual filmmaking team about their determination to continue telling stories against all the odds.

Watch this episode of The Fabulous Picture Show here:

Part 1:

Part 2:

This episode of The Fabulous Picture Show aired from 22 -29 September

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