Gay love in transit
By
Tim Benzie
Sydney Star Observer Issue 750 Published 3/02/2005
Director Craig Boreham won’t be attending the screening of his short film on the Queer Screen Opening Night – but he has an impressive excuse. Boreham will be in Germany, where Transient has been selected as part of the BerlinInternational Film Festival. “It’s such a bummer because I’ve been dying to see it at the State Theatre and I have to miss it. I have to go to Berlin, so it’s not too bad,” Boreham told Sydney Star Observer. Transient is one of nine finalists in the My Queer Career competition, which this year is held as the Mardi Gras Film Festival’s opening night event. The video about a failed love affair is only nine minutes long but is set in two countries: Australia and Vietnam. “It’s about a couple who meet when they’re living and working in another country, so they’re aliens within that landscape,” Boreham said. “They have this really intense relationship ... and then they have this desire to go back to their own country and be normal. And it’s when they do that that things start to erode.”
Although a work of fiction the film stars Boreham and his real-life partner Phoenix Leonard as the gay couple – casting prompted by a recent overseas trip. “I was travelling in Vietnam and thought I should set it here and do it here, because it was just so beautiful and I really wanted to start capturing it on film. Phoenix was travelling with me – he had no choice but to be in it!” Boreham said.
Once back in Sydney, Boreham employed the services of Ian Roberts as the narrator – his character’s inner voice. “All my friends freak out when they see it, they think that’s not your voice,” he said. “But I wanted that sort of tone in the voice that almost hypnotises you when you hear it, and he has that. He’s got a great voice.”
Transient was funded by the NSW Film and Television Office’s Young Filmmaker’s Fund and will screen at the Berlin International Film Festival in the Panorama section of new works. Transient screens as part of the Queer Screen opening night My Queer Career Awards.