Where is Koraly?

Where is Koraly? Why hasn’t she blogged in weeks? Koraly is in another space, in a world she created just for you. She is trying to interpret Ella’s mind, fighting with Harry, laughing with Sandra, tormenting Anna.

Koraly is falling in love.

Koraly is analysing what it means to be a wog in Australia. She’s trying to understand why Ella longs for Cyprus like she was born there. Koraly is living and breathing the seventh draft of Xenos. And yes, she is re-writing the entire manuscript – that’s what a draft is. It isn’t polishing, or moving words around, it is re-writing. Each draft of a novel explores characters, story, plot. You start with a vague idea and the more drafts you do, the clearer it all becomes until your characters are ALIVE on the page, living, breathing, and the story writes itself. You don’t tell THEM what happened, they tell YOU. That’s where Koraly is. For the first time ever, her characters are ALIVE. Koraly’s sitting at her computer, typing away, channeling the story.

She doesn’t sleep much.

She’s shut out the world.

The only world she knows is Ella’s.

Don’t worry, she’s not alone – Dalaras and Hatzigiannis are keeping her company.

Koraly will be away until mid November, until the seventh draft of her manuscript is finished. It was once called Xenos, but now she’s thinking, ‘Broken Aphrodite’. Any thoughts on that title, Koraly asks, from somewhere deep within the pages?

When Koraly comes back from her trip, she’ll have a lot to talk about on this blog.

Uni made me dumb – outrage over the government’s skills reform

Before I started university, years and years ago, I would read a book a week. I would let my imagination lead me into worlds created by masters and they would feed my soul. My first loves were R.L Stine and Christopher Pike, then Virginia Andrews. When people looked for me they would find me behind the cover of a book. Books taught me fancy words my migrant parents would raise their eyebrows at. Books gave me so much – grammar, escape, an appreciation for the English language.

Then came uni.

When I started my Accounting – Computing degree, I stopped reading. Sorry, that’s a lie. I did read – text books. I also slept in lecture theatres – my Accounting degree went in one ear and came out the other. My vocabulary died. My imagination dried up. My writing suffered while I wrote code instead of short stories:

Public String victorianGovernment = ‘clueless imbeciles’;

Excuse my assigning the variable ‘government’ with ‘clueless imbeciles’ but right now, that’s how I feel about the government and their neatly packaged ‘Skills Reform’. If you visit the skills reform website you may be excited by phrases such as ‘new funding to create over 170,000 new training places’ or ‘upgrade TAFE facilities’ and the one I love most ‘more opportunities for training throughout your adult life and flexible fee arrangements’. All these phrases are enough to get the average stay-at-home mother excited about the prospect of a new life.

Unfortunately, they may have to think again.

See, what I don’t understand is, why can’t the government just be honest? Why do they have to package the truth with propaganda and shiny marketing material? The truth is, with the changes implemented by the government in July 2009, it may cost you almost as much to go to TAFE as it does to go to uni. How much it will cost depends on which basket you fall into.

Greek Film Festival: Bang Bang wedding

Bang Bang Wedding staring Alex Dimitriades, is set on the island of Crete in Greece. The film spans one day – Ilias and Marina’s wedding. This comedy brings us many colourful and humorous characters, all guests of the wedding, and follows them as they travel the island of Crete to get from the church to the reception of the wedding. The scenery in this film is spectacular and made me want to book a ticket to Greece – tomorrow.

There were some hilarious moments in this film. However, sometimes I felt that the comedy was bordering on farce – each situation that unfolded was more unbelievable than its predecessor. It was funny at the start but after a while it became a little boring and repetitious. Most of the film takes place while guests are in their cars and it wasn’t long before I was nauseated. Some of the best acting was done by the supporting actors, particullarly the mothers and the maid of honour – Ilias and Marina were a bit of a letdown. I didn’t feel the love or chemistry between them. When Alex’s character, Illias, was first introduced, he awkwardly stuck out – everyone was speaking fluent Greek, and fast, while Alex’s Greek wasn’t as confident. It wasn’t revealed until the end of the film that Ilias had only been in Greece for 5 years which is information I would have liked from the start.

Greek Film Festival: A Woman’s Way – Strella

In the film A Woman’s Way – Strella, Yiorgos has just been released from prison after a fifteen-year sentence. He checks himself into a small hotel and begins the search for his son, whom he has not seen in all this time. Strella – a tall woman, with long, thin legs and thick brown hair – is also staying at this hotel. She is a transsexual prostitute, and I just couldn’t believe she was previously a man – she was stunning. Strella uses the hotel when she is with her clients but has her own house in Athens. Yiorgos and Strella begin a relationship together and Strella invites Yiorgos to stay with her. Their relationship blossoms, the feelings and love between them believable and heart-warming. But when Yiorgos uncovers a secret about his son, everything changes.

Through Strella’s eyes the audience is taken into the world of the transsexual where we meet funny, lovable and unique characters. But Strella outshines them all with her honesty, compassion and humour. The acting for Strella’s character is natural and believable. Some of the sex scenes in this film are confronting but all within context. The transsexual life today is misjudged and misunderstood by many. I admire this film’s ability to clear the air and show these woman facing problems and dealing with life just like everybody else does. Through Strella the audience is exposed to issues of the rebirth – when a man becomes a transsexual – and the blurring of boundaries when it comes to love.

Greek Film Festival: Well kept secrets – Athanasia

Athanasia was born in Greece but lives in America with her American husband. She has one daughter, Angela, who is also married, and one grandchild. However, the secrets of Athanasia’s past haunt her relationship with her daughter. When Angela learns that her American father is not her biological father, she returns to Greece to find her real father and to uncover her mother’s past.

The narrative of the film moves from the present to Athanasia’s heartbreaking past and back again. There were moments where I was moved to tears by all the hardship that Athanasia endured. However, it was unclear by the end of the film if Angela, the daughter, had uncovered Athanasia’s story. The film moves from the past to the present but the two don’t seem to be linked in any way.

Greek Film Festival: The last homecoming

The last homecoming – the only film in the Greek Film Festival set in Cyprus – was still tugging at my heart the day after. I left the cinema wiping tears from my eyes and so proud that a Cypriot had made such a beautiful film that appealed to a large audience – younger and older generations, Cypriots and non-Cypriots.

This film takes us to the shores of Cyprus into the heart of a small, tight-knit village where everyone knows everyone’s business. The Cypriot dialect is thick and convincing and the characters are colourful, exciting and mysterious. It is 1974 and although Turkish-Cypriots and Greek-Cypriots live together in harmony, tensions are rising as some believe there should be ENOSIS with Greece and while others do not.

From the first 10 minutes of the film I knew I was in capable hands – director Corinna Avraamidou knows about story and how to create a story. The pace of this film was perfect, never too slow or too fast. The inciting incident was clear – Alexandra, a Greek beauty, handing a letter to Stefanos in secret. They have never met. Both characters have similar political agendas and do not want ENOSIS with Greece.

Greek Film Festival: Tale 52

Tale 52, directed by Alexis Alexiou, begins with a dinner party – Iasonas is the host and Penelope, a guest invited by one of Iasonas’s friends. The story hints to a spark between Iasonas and Penelope and so the story begins. This film experiments with reality and the dream and you never really know if Iasonas is awake or sleeping, a psychopath or someone that’s being tricked. Alexiou does an interesting job of portraying this but what has ultimately been forgotten is story – you end up right where you started, and feel confused and cheated. If you need a film that has a story and character development, you will probably find yourself very irritated with the acting – which is mediocre at most – or staring at the walls. For those who love thrillers, you may find it entertaining.

Koraly’s rating: 1 1/2 stars

Greek Film Festival: Dogtooth

This is one of the best film I have seen in a long time, and what made it even better was that it was Greek. The content in Dogtooth is confronting, challenging, and literally takes a bite out of you. It’s the first Greek film to make official selection at the Cannes Film Festival in ten years, and it definitely earned its place. Dogtooth was the first film I saw at the Greek Film festival – it was refreshing to hear my native tongue on the big screen.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos catapults the viewer into a convincing world – all within the four walls of a massive property in the middle of nowhere. The three unnamed adolescent children have never seen the outside world and are beginning to discover their bodies. The drama begins when the father – the only member of the family that leaves the house – brings home a prostitute to satisfy his son. It is through this one “exposure” that the family setup begins to crack open.

All the acting in this film was beyond convincing – it was as if those three adolescents had never seen the outside world. Their naivety was believable and hilarious, the parents making up definitions for words as they went along – when a child asked their mother what a zombie was she replied “a yellow flower”!

MWF: Is neo-liberalism finished?

MWF: Is Neo-liberalism Finished?

Robert Manne’s lecture was by far the most informative and interesting session I attended at the writer’s festival. I was actually going to also attend Does democracy have a future? but got the dates wrong in my diary. So if anyone went to that lecture I’d really appreciate the key points you came away with. The lecture I attended, which formed part of The Quarterly’s lecture series, explored non-liberalism (free markets) and whether or not they would survive.

Mr Manne began his talk by reflecting on the past and the end of the Great Depression when the Keynesian theory emerged. This theory is similar to neo-liberalism – its principles on capitalism are similar but where they differ is that Keynesian’s don’t believe the market is self-correcting and believe there should be government intervention whereas neo-liberalists don’t. Thirty years after the Great Depression, when Thatcher came into power in the UK, she favoured neo-liberalism and so Keynesianism was thrown out the door while she privatised government-owned enterprises. This was the period were neo-liberalism was embraced by Western governments and we can look at our own government privatising Telstra as an example of this.

Neo-liberalism is essentially individuals pursuing self-interests in free markets. Global trading takes place freely without government intervention. Competition is necessary so monopolies are prevented from happening. Trade-unions are tamed by governments because labour should be market set. An example of this would be a corporation outsourcing to India because the labour is three times cheaper. Markets should be deregulated because they are self-correcting.

MWF: Put your hands all over my body

Put your hands all over my body

Linda Jaivin, Krissy Kneen and Nikki Gemmell, all writers of erotic fiction discussed the genre. The chair of the conversation, Peter Veitch, was obviously nervous, stumbling on words and making statements that his panellist didn’t agree with – his intentions were good though.

When Peter asked about guilt and its relationship to writing erotic fiction, all three women agreed that they didn’t identify with guilt when they wrote erotic fiction. Nikki said that when she wrote The Bride Stripped Bare, she found it liberating. She explained that everyone has a public, private and secret self, and she challenges anyone that says they know their partner’s secret life.

Peter asked about erotic fiction and if it stems from dysfunction – and Krissy quickly stopped him. Her debut novel Affection, is a memoir where she pretty much exposes her sexual life. I think it’s admirable that she has the courage to be so publicly honest. She explained that she didn’t think humans were meant to be monogamous – it’s not about dysfunction, she said, it’s about the world’s problem with this concept. She believes that you’re born alone and you die alone, and anyone that thinks differently is lying to themselves.