After my last observation, I noticed that I’ve actually been concentrating more on noticing situations of conflict in public. I just think it is so interesting to get this quick glimpse into people’s lives through one encounter. I always feel so embarrassed when I am having similar situations in public because I feel like people are just watching and judging, but some people just seem to have no awareness of the people around them, watching this intimate quarrel.

I was stuck in traffic driving home along Punt Road and while I was just static in amongst a billion cars, I started to hear this loud yelling coming from the side of the road. I turned my music down and just watched this moment between these two people. A man and a woman wearing standing on the footpath outside a closed bar, and they both had their hands on this bike. Not in a way that looked like they were fighting over who got custody over it, but more so just leaning on it. This seemed so strange to me because they were yelling at each other incredibly, but still had their hands quite close together on this bike. They seemed still so intimate in such an aggressive engagement.

THE FILM

Instead of staying true to the observation itself, I want to just concentrate on conflict itself. I was thinking of going into the conflict between a mother and a daughter. I wanted to show this from the daughters perspective, and how life is often interrupted by these moments. I want the film to be set very late at night or early in the morning, maybe 3am, with the weather being very hot, maybe 30 degrees. Her bedroom is covered in pink items; clothes, furniture, wallpaper. The roo is lit with a pinky/red light. The girl is in her room trying to cool herself down by opening windows and turning on fans. She starts to walk to the kitchen for a glass of cold water but can hear muttering coming from the dark of the kitchen. She turns the light on and sees her mum sitting alone on the small round kitchen table, with fallen empty bottles and still wet tears on her cheeks. She is very clearly drunk. I wanted to write quite an emotionally abusive dialogue here coming from the mother towards her daughter, without her realising in her head that it is actually her daughter. She talks about how she blames her daughter for her divorce, and how her life is ruined because she was burdened by an unwanted pregnancy. She could’ve been famous, she could’ve been extremely successful, but the birth of her only child ruined everything for her. I wanted to them follow this emotional dialogue with the daughter visibly upset by this, and climbing out of her bedroom window. She ends up at the local roller skating rink that she works at a few times a week. We have a scene of her standing in the middle of the rink, bare foot, swaying to the music playing. The lights are bright and colourful, with lots of movement. She has her eyes closed and her arms above her head. She is crying.

I want to just make a film that is a bit dark in subject matter, and focuses on the fact that sometimes happiness is fleeting.