Peter Scott

David Bradbury

PETER SCOTT :: B#SHARP PRODUCTIONS PTY LTD  

Peter Scott has been a film-maker and educator for over twenty years. During the eighties Peter produced and directed promotional videos for some of Australia's top bands, receiving the prestigious Countdown Award for best video in 1986. Some of these music videos were also recognized by the art world by being included in the 1986 Australian Art Prospecta and in major galleries internationally.

Moving to Byron Bay in 1989, Peter soon became established as the top film technician in the area, working on many documentaries and television commercials for most of the top producers in the area and helping to establish the fledgling industry that is thriving today. Peter has worked at every level in the industry from sound, camera and editing, to directing and producing films for international broadcast.

As well as working in the film industry Peter has also taught multimedia subjects from secondary education to TAFE and at university. Recently Peter has written media courses for the Department of School Education and has been approached to develop online education resources for Vocational Education and Training and TAFE.

Presently Peter has two documentary films in development.

DAVID BRADBURY :: FRONTLINE FILMS

David Bradbury has earned an international reputation as a filmmaker willing to go to extraordinary lengths for a cause, exposing political oppression and environmental vandalism.

In 1972 he began his career as a radio journalist with the ABC after graduating from the Australian National University with a BA in Political Science. After post graduate studies in broadcast journalism in the United States, he worked as a freelance journalist covering the Spring Revolution in Portugal in 1974 as well as the overthrow of the Greek military junta in Athens that same year and the final days of the Shah of Iran.

In 1977 Bradbury smuggled himself into the border area of Papua New Guinea and West Papua and brought out photos and the first ever interview with the Free Papua Movement (OPM) in their guerrilla struggle against the Indonesian military.

His first film, Frontline, a portrait of legendary Australian news cameraman Neil Davis in Vietnam, earned Bradbury his first Academy Award nomination. It won first prize at the Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals, the coveted Grierson award at the American Film Festival and was screened worldwide on PBS, BBC and TF1 in France.

His next film, Public Enemy Number One, followed the life of controversial Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, the first western correspondent into Hiroshima after the bomb was dropped. The documentary shows how Burchett was vilified by the mainstream press and conservative public in Australia for his coverage of "the other side" in the Korean and Vietnam wars. The film won the Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary at the San Francisco Film Festival in 1981, the Christopher Statuette at the Columbus Film Festival, Best Documentary at the Sydney Film Festival, an AFI award and was screened in Berlin, London, Edinburgh. American and Cork Film Festivals to critical acclaim. It was never shown on Australian TV because it was too controversial.

In 1982 the writer, Graham Greene, a friend and mentor to Bradbury, advised him to go to Nicaragua. The covert war of the CIA against the Sandinistas had started. His film, Nicaragua: No Pasaran, is an epic piece that uses as its central character Sandinista leader Tomas Borge. It won a special certificate of High Merit at the 1985 Academy Awards and was shown in film festivals and art house cinemas across the US, the UK and Australia.

Chile: Hasta Cuando? earned Bradbury another Academy Award nomination in 1986. Filmed covertly, the film gave a glimpse of life under Pinochet's military dictatorship. When it opened in theatres in Sydney and Melbourne it broke all box office records for a political documentary. It scooped the Australian Film Industry awards that year for Best Direction, Best Soundtrack and Best Cinematography as well as first prize at Rio de Janeiro, Cuba and Mannheim Film Festivals.

South of the Border, produced in 1987, used the popular music of the grass roots movement of Central America to tell the story of people’s political struggle against dictatorship and entrenched privilege. It was broadcast around the world.

In 1988 Bradbury turned his cameras back home to make State of Shock. This film told the tragic story of Alwyn Peters, an Aboriginal man in his 20’s who murdered his girlfriend on Weipa South Aboriginal reserve while drunk. The film generated controversy amongst urban black and white activists when first released because it showed the reality of drunken indigenous male violence towards their women. Centred around the Peters family from Mapoon in Cape York, the film showed how Alwyn Peters, the central character was a product of disposssession and alienation from hisown culture after a mining company took away his family’s tribal land and uprooting him from his traditions. It was screened on the ABC and on Channel Four in the UK.

Polska was shot in Poland in l990 on the eve of the break-up of the Soviet Union. It charts the tragic but inspiring history of Poland from Aushwitz to the building of the Berlin Wall to Solidarity’s coming to power. The film uses the personalised account of 28 year old Polish journalist Beata Ligmann from Gdansk, tracing her experience from student protest days to the present as she watches Soviet troops pack up and leave her country for an uncertain future in their homeland…as the carpet baggers of the West prepare to take over from where the Soviets left off.

Shoalwater: Up for Grabs (1992) saw Bradbury combine his film making talents with long time university friend and environmental activist Peter Garrett, current MP and former lead singer in the rock band Midnight Oil. Aired nationally on the Seven Network, the film was instrumental in stopping sandmining going ahead in the largest untouched area of wilderness on the east coast of Australia south of Cooktown. The Federal Government and Prime Minister Paul Keating moved to protect the area three weeks after the film was shown.

In 1993 Bradbury directed Nazi Supergrass, an insider’s story of the neo-Nazi movement in Perth, Western Australia. Bradbury befriended the former treasurer and third in command of the Australian Nationalist Movement which for three years had terrorised the Asian and Jewish communities of Perth.

In 1994 Bradbury made The Last Whale, an expose of Japanese attempts to buy the vote of small countries in order to block a proposal for a sanctuary for whales in the Antarctic. Presented by Olivia Newton-John, it was shown on the CNN network, the Nine Network in Australia and on Discovery, as well as in England, France, South Africa, Holland, the Czech Republic and Mexico.

The Battle for Byron which Bradbury produced, filmed and co-directed was about the alternative community in Byron Bay coming together to halt inappropriate development in one of the most scenic and biodiverse areas of coastal Australia where Bradbury lives It tracked the struggle over four years of community attempts to stop developers and Club Med and culminated in the election of a ‘green’ council. The film was shown on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Loggerheads was finished in 1997 and was a gutsy cinema verite look at the battle on the frontline of the forests in Northern NSW between loggers and the so–called ‘feral’ activists.

Jabiluka (1998) tells the story of the Mirrar Aboriginal people’s opposition to another uranium mine on their country in World Heritage listed Kakadu National Park. It was pivotal in mobilising public opposition to the mine. The mine was halted.

Bradbury’s film, Wamsley’s War, was a profile of controversial conservationist Dr. John Wamsley, better known for wearing a feral cat hat on his head to make his point that feral animals are ruining Australia’s native wildlife. Wamsley had grand plans to own l% of the land space of Australia within the next 20 years and launched his company Earth Sanctuaries on the Aust Stock Exchange raising millions to realise his dream. But that all came unstuck when he overcapitalised and had to sell off part of his company. Wamsley’s War screened on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2000.

Bradbury’s last film - Fond Memories of Cuba -screened on SBS Independent in January 2003. Jim Mitsos is an aging Australian socialist and multi millionaire who believes ‘the dream’ is still alive in Cuba today. He sponsors Bradbury to travel to Cuba to make a film that captures that dream and to bring it back to Australia and the world. But what Bradbury discovers is not quite what Jim expects him to bring back. As the filmmaker uncovers the reality of dashed socialist dreams laid bare by 40 years of imported grey drabness and Soviet style socialism, he discovers a new generation’s faith in the bright bauble of capitalism which has ‘invaded’ the country as the desperate ‘fix’ that the now isolated Cuban leadership must reluctantly embrace. It is set against a backdrop of fantastic music and musicians that the filmmaker encounters on his journey through Cuba as he travels across the island on trains, in broken down old cars and sometimes hitchhiking with his nine year old son. Bradbury’s quest sets up a moral dilemma for the filmmaker who is here on Jim’s money to bring back a positive story of the Revolution, but can’t help but see the contradictions. Cubans continue to grow quietly frustrated after more than four decades of Fidel in power and one party rule and this sets the stage for an interesting undercurrent and growing call for change that the filmmaker has documented in his film.

BEYOND PARADISE is a feature film script Bradbury is currently working on for a drama to be shot on location in East Timor, a small island to the north of Australia which was invaded by the Indonesian military in l975. The story revolves around the murder of five Australian newsmen at Balibo and the daughter of one of the five journalists who decides to find out how and why her father was killed l6 years earlier. She lands in a hotbed of intrigue and political brutality just two weeks before the infamous Santa Cruz massacre took place in a cemetery in Dili November l991, in which hundreds of unarmed Timorese were gunned down.

Bradbury is currently editing his documentary Raul the Terrible set in Argentina about the picquetero (picketers) movement and one of its most charismatic leaders, Raul Castells.The picqueteros are a unique grassroots response of poor and unemployed people to the disastrous effects that globalisation and corrupt politics visited upon the Argentinian economy in the 90’s and into this decade. It has been pre-sold to SBSI television in Australia.

::YANTRA DeVILDER

“Recorded music and using the studio as a compositional device is a unique way of working. It is special as it captures the spirit of a moment in time as a recording. The act of improvisation for me, is one of the purest ways to experience a 3 way communion with the music, the other players and the listener, for it is impelled by a discipline of adhering to the pre requisites of a condition of here and now. To me this is true meditation. Where one can be so absorbed in the process of listening to the tune of the heart, that there is no room for judgement and pre conditioned notions of what is right and wrong. All too often, those of us who make a career and study of music, can become weighed down by the baggage of analysis and rules. My intention with my music is to create a work that is a soothing balm in these interesting times of great turbulence.”