Fedele Talking to the video camera also very much became my way to combat loneliness, and an attempt to make sense of some of the extremely foreign and interesting experiences that I was having. It also gave me a sense of purpose. I returned to Australia with about 16 hours of footage on tapes that pretty much sat on a shelf for the next couple of years doing nothing. I always had it in the back of my head to somehow try to edit the footage into some sort of film, but I had no idea how.
About 2 or 3 years later I found myself living in London, and had brought the tapes along with me. I met a very talented filmmaker called Rebecca Kenyon, who is now a very good friend of mine, told her about these tapes that I had, and she was very interested in having a look at the footage. Over the next year, we slowly worked the footage into some sort of storyline, editing it into an 88 minute film called PNG Style. I entered PNG Style into a few festivals, and it was awarded “Best Documentary” at Portobello Film Festival 2010. So I call PNG Style a bit of a “film by accident”. I really had no idea what I was doing, but a big part of me thinks that that is actually the charm of the film. I didn’t know any of the rules, so I unknowingly broke every one of
them. I truly believe that creativity can sometimes be taught out of you. But for whatever reason, I found the act of filming quite simple and natural.
So in October 2010 after winning the award at the Portobello Film Festival, I decided to do a 15-day intensive documentary filmmaking course at the DFG (Documentary Filmmakers Group) in Dalston, London. I can’t speak highly enough of this course – it was an amazingly practical way to be introduced to many of the skills required for documentary filmmaking. It had a hands-on approach that I like, and as part of that we got to direct and edit our own short film. That inspired me to buy a Mac and editing software, as well as a little Sony A1 camera. So I had all the gear to make a film, but needed a topic. I went back to Australia at the end of 2010, and while I was there, I read an article written by an Australian that had spent 43 years in Papua New Guinea and had just returned to Australia. He was writing with sadness and anger about the logging occurring in PNG, and the destruction that this was causing to the environment and the local indigenous communities and cultures. This is an excerpt from his letter: 07