On October 26, the DGA screened director Tony Krawitz’s documentary The Tall Man at the Guild’s theater complex in Los Angeles.
The Tall Man exposes the complexities of Australia’s racial politics as it takes the audience into the tropical paradise of Queensland’s Palm Island where one morning in 2004 an aboriginal man named Cameron Doomadgee was arrested for swearing at a white police officer – Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, aka “the tall man.” Forty-five minutes later Doomadgee lay dead in a cell with massive internal injuries. Outraged, the Palm Islanders rioted, burnt down the police station, and rocketed the story to the nation’s front pages. The film seeks to uncover exactly what happened to Doomadgee and how the course of justice became so perverted with the police solidly on one side and the citizens on another.
Krawitz’s filmography includes episodes of Australian television dramas such as City Homicide, All Saints, The Silence and The Surgeon. He is also the director of the AFI Award-winning short feature Jewboy and his feature film, Dead Europe, recently premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
After being introduced by DGA Associate Executive Director, Government & International Affairs Kathy Garmezy and Australian Directors Guild General Manager Kingston Anderson, Krawitz spoke a little about the making of the film. Following the screening, he engaged in a more detailed Q&A session moderated by director Eva Orner (The Network).
The Tall Man was presented by the Australian Directors Guild as part of the DGA’s Director’s Finder Screening Series which was created by the Independent Directors Committee in 1998 with the goal of drawing attention to undistributed low budget and/or independent feature films directed by DGA members. As part of DGA’s bilateral relationships with other English-speaking directors’ guilds abroad, the DGA began hosting country-specific Director’s Finder screenings in 2004.