TIME WAS…….
Geoffrey Weary 

SCA Galleries
Sydney College of the Arts
University of Sydney, AUSTRALIA

PORTRAITS 

Production Company: Strange Cities Productions
Director/Producer: Geoffrey Weary
Produced in association with Screen Australia (AFC)

Cast: Tatiana Pentes, Leakhena Sy, Rose Tang

PORTRAITS is an experimental digital work that explores three contrasting experiences of war and conflict in the middle and late 20th century. A woman living in Shanghai is expelled from China after the Communist Revolution in 1949. The ghosts of the Cold War appear and disappear in the crumbling ruins of the Berlin Wall in 1990. A young woman suffers a crisis of identity around the circumstances of her birth at the end of the war in Cambodia in 1978

SCENES FROM A SHANGHAI HOTEL

An experimental film by Geoffrey Weary

A Russian woman living in Shanghai is expelled from China after the Communist Revolution in 1949. Her story begins in a hotel room in Shanghai and ends on a suburban street in Sydney, Australia. Performative, fictional, and documentary elements are blended into a work that is suggestive and open to multiple readings. Extensive use of film leader and scratchy film surfaces add to the sense that what we are seeing resembles something that is illusive, dream-like, just beyond grasp…..or is it just a newsreel playing in someone’s head? Cast: Rose Tang and Tatiana Pentes

CAPTIVE

An experimental film by Geoffrey Weary

CAPTIVE explores the themes of repression, confinement and escape. These themes are expressed through the incorporation of grainy VHS footage shot in Berlin at the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, hand-held camera sequences shot in a maze-like forest and slices of footage composited out of archival Cold War films. As the real historical Wall crumbles under the blows of street hawkers and souvenir hunters, ghostly specters from the past appear then dissolve back into the scratchy surface of a long forgotten newsreel.

Captive by Geoffrey Weary from Strange Cities Productions on Vimeo.

My Mother Told Me

An experimental film by Geoffrey Weary

A young woman tells the story of her family’s destruction during the war in Cambodia, 1975-1978. Later as a refugee living with her mother in Sydney, Australia she suffers an identity crisis that is linked to the unexplained circumstances of her birth and the mystery of the father that she has never known. Cast: Leakhena Sy

My Mother Told Me by Geoffrey Weary from Strange Cities Productions on Vimeo.
My Mother Told Me

Australia’s audiovisual heritage online Australian Screen http://aso.gov.au/titles/shorts/my-mother-told-me/