I met Dn alum David Easteal at an event at the Bánnfy Castle, around half an hour’s drive (in good traffic) from Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where I was covering the Transylvanian International Film Festival. We got to talking, and after I mentioned Directors Notes, he mentioned it had been over ten years since we’d featured his short film The Father on the Dn podcast. With his remarkable debut feature The Plains playing in the festival’s What’s Up Doc section, it was the perfect excuse to sit down with him for a highly belated follow-up interview. Shot over the course of a year, The Plains is a documentary/fiction hybrid that boasts a simple premise: legal worker Andrew Rakowski drives home every day from the suburbs of Melbourne into the centre. Usually stuck in dreadful traffic, he calls his mother and wife along the way; sometimes he picks up David himself.
- 6/30/2022
- by Redmond Bacon
- Directors Notes
In this amazing work of art, we sit behind a middle-aged lawyer on his commute as he calls his family, listens to radio and gives a lift to a colleague
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Many strange thoughts ping-ponged around my mind while watching David Easteal’s three-hour drama The Plains, despite nothing remotely strange occurring during it. Based in the back of a car for almost the entirety of its very hefty running time, the film captures a series of work-to-home commutes for a middle-aged lawyer, Andrew (Andrew Rakowski), who has a familiar routine: calling his mother and wife; listening to talkback radio; sitting in silence; or chatting to a colleague who he sometimes gives a lift home.
Sound interesting? Of course not. But this extraordinarily mundane film – a combination of words I’m fairly certain I’ve never used before – is a tremendous achievement and,...
Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email and listen to our podcast
Many strange thoughts ping-ponged around my mind while watching David Easteal’s three-hour drama The Plains, despite nothing remotely strange occurring during it. Based in the back of a car for almost the entirety of its very hefty running time, the film captures a series of work-to-home commutes for a middle-aged lawyer, Andrew (Andrew Rakowski), who has a familiar routine: calling his mother and wife; listening to talkback radio; sitting in silence; or chatting to a colleague who he sometimes gives a lift home.
Sound interesting? Of course not. But this extraordinarily mundane film – a combination of words I’m fairly certain I’ve never used before – is a tremendous achievement and,...
- 6/9/2022
- by Luke Buckmaster
- The Guardian - Film News
It’s 5 p.m. and the day tumbles white with clouds. A car sneaks out of a parking lot and into traffic. The man at the wheel is alone. He turns off the radio and makes two phone calls: one to his old mother—”Hello Mutti, it’s Buschi”—and one to his wife. We listen to him chat as the outskirts of Melbourne flash by in a long caravan of office buildings and highway bridges. We sit behind him, in the car; all we see of his face is a slanted reflection in the rearview mirror. His name is Andrew (Andrew Rakowski), a lawyer pushing 60. For the past 13 years this has been his commute; for the next three hours The Plains keeps us in the backseat of his Hyundai as he drives home from work. This, in a nutshell, is all there is to David Easteal’s feature debut.
- 2/4/2022
- by Leonardo Goi
- The Film Stage
The “dead time” of the daily commute comes alive in “The Plains,” an absorbing documentary-drama hybrid that places viewers in the car of a middle-aged Melbourne lawyer during his drive home from work during the course of a year. Skilfully creating an engaging and likable protagonist without fully showing his face until the three-hour running time has all but elapsed, David Easteal’s first feature is a thematically rich and quietly compelling portrait of a man at the crossroads. Although an extremely difficult commercial path lies ahead, this epic-length existentialist road movie should enjoy a strong festival run following its world premiere at Rotterdam.
Occasionally punctuated by views of flat, treeless plains that give the film its title and shed light on the central character’s life choices and relationships, “The Plains” is essentially a single-location drama. Almost the entire film is seen through the lens of a camera fixed...
Occasionally punctuated by views of flat, treeless plains that give the film its title and shed light on the central character’s life choices and relationships, “The Plains” is essentially a single-location drama. Almost the entire film is seen through the lens of a camera fixed...
- 1/31/2022
- by Richard Kuipers
- Variety Film + TV
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