Director Rachel Lane was stumped. After six frustrating years trying to make a film about the brilliant Australian writer Charmian Clift, with no interest from government agencies and broadcasters, how could she get it made? The solution: take out a newspaper ad. Charmian Clift in Rachel Lane’s documentary Charmian Clift: Life Burns High.
Credit: Sydney Film Festival “Charmian Clift was one of the greatest Australian writers of the 20th century,” the ad in The Sydney Morning Herald read. “Her weekly newspaper column was a radicalising force for feminism and multiculturalism, and her Greek travel memoirs kicked off a genre. We need your help to raise production funds to tell her story.
” Such is the enduring popularity of Clift that more than 230 contributors helped Lane shoot the documentary Charmian Clift: Life Burns High . Now it is having a world premiere at Sydney Film Festival, which starts on Wednesday. In another sign of her currency, the two programmed sessions sold out faster than just about anything else at the festival.
Loading It follows Clift from her adventurous childhood in Kiama on the NSW south coast to her World War II career writing and editing an army magazine, then her scandalous relationship with George Johnston, a famous war correspondent who was more than a decade older and married with a child. It recounts their bohemian life together in an artistic community on the Greek island of Hydra, raising three children. Then, back in Australia, the s.
