Mine Mine Mine

This film is a crip adaptation of Peter Pan to a regional Australian town where a boy dreams of being powerful like Peter Pan. What’s great about Heath Ramsay’s crip Peter Pan however is that he is no saint. Peter isn’t the hero. Too often we’re portrayed as heroes… or virgins… or do gooders.

Ramsay’s lead is just as much attracted to Peter Pan’s marauding and fighting nature, as his desire to fly and rescue people. In this filmic telling of Peter’s story – beautifully shot and eerily choreographed with performers moving through the landscaped slowed, effected, made eerie, or dream-like – scary mask-wearing kids in an open setting that evokes the photography of Diane Arbus.

We move between fantasies of flying and ‘saving people’ like Peter Pan to the close-ups and banalities of everyday crip life.

Then a car gets stolen.

Mine Mine Mine breaks conventions around filmmaking (and the stereotypical crip style where it’s always deeply personal = earnest) – here reality is rubbery. Time isn’t linear. Think about it – how much of Deaf and Disabled filmmaking revolves around True Autobiographical stories? Here Mine Mine Mine throws mud at the dominant crip screen career pathway:

the first film about ourselves;

the second about our community

And the 3rd never happens…

It’s great to see a new bunch of Australian filmmakers in this Resistance series who are playing with narrative, invention, imagination. This is what funding and production partners (here The Corinthian Food Store and disability arts company Midnight Feast) can achieve. An extra big shout out to – Heath Ramsay who is writer and lead actor. Heath is currently an associate artist with Midnight Feast, the first resident arts company at NIDA. He couldn’t be more proud of Mine Mine Mine, his short film debut.

Meanwhile in Neverland with voice-over and the sync dialogue being very effected and weird, and the bushland and interior backdrops hyper-realistically spooky, the kids are revolting (as in revolution) and the Wendy character presses Peter to do the right thing, but he resists.

The ending is PERFECT and comes at a moment when you think all hope is lost. And voila, this amazing and powerful and crip-upliftingly beautiful and accurate ending

_– your crip and different buddies save you and share with you the journey – _

Solidarity, resistance, pleasure, sharing, community – the last minutes!

This is a sophisticated and wonderful and confronting and resonant and poetic film – art direction is so key - fantastic and spare – as in detailed and rich but not overdone.

More please.