AustLit

'Here I Am, touring the country with the Message Sticks program and soon on general release, is Beck Cole’s first feature, but it comes after a substantial record in documentary and half-hour dramas. Cole was one of the writer-directors on SBS’s First Australians; in Wirriya – Small Boy, she watched seven-year-old Ricco, who lives in one of the Alice Springs town camps, on the day he goes to school, and then on the day he wags it. In the highly enjoyable The Lore of Love, she observed a group of feisty grandmothers joking as they instruct a teenage girl on men and sex; in Plains Empty she drew a fine brief ghost story from a remote mining area. Her images of people in their settings stick in the memory for years; if, as Cole has said in interviews, her work in documentary and drama draws life from her responses to individual people, its strength is equally in the way locations themselves tell the stories.' (Introduction)