Maras' film The Palace wins new prestigious awards

February 2012

Sunday, January 15, 2012 will go down as one of Anthony Maras' most proudest days. The South Australian filmmaker's latest powerful short film, The Palace, cleaned up at both the inaugural AACTA Awards and Flickerfest.

Earlier in the day, Maras – an AFI Award winner – won gongs for Best Short Fiction Film and Best Screenplay In A Short Film at the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts' revamped awards before travelling to Sydney's Bondi Beach to collect Best Australian Short Film at the 21st annual Flickerfest ceremony.

Βy Timothy E. RAW

The only moment of grace and human kindness during Anthony Maras' The Palace is of the heart-in-your throat variety. Set during the 1974 conflict in Cyprus, a nineteen-year-old Turkish conscript finds a Greek mother and newborn baby in hiding during a sweep of an abandoned palace. Looking down the barrel of a gun, the young man with aspirations of studying as an actor at RADA in London is faced with the awful recognition of what he's participating in. Up till now he's kept his head down, blindly following the instruction of his superiors, but witnessing the cruel indignity of a desperate mother—on the verge of smothering her child so that her cries won't give away their position—is an incident that snaps him out of mechanized stupor. In the next room his sergeant gleefully encourages torture, barking orders which harbor no consideration for the value of human life, only that such brutality will help turn the boys under his charge into men. Momentarily paralyzed by the sight of this newborn with no comprehension of the erupting tensions between the two communities, the soldier is forced to make a choice, and in so doing confront the full measure of the atrocities committed, his part in them and the blood that he'll never be able to wash of his hands, even as far away as the UK. Time seems to slip into suspended animation, but as he finally shifts down a gear after an extended opening shootout featuring one of the year's most bone-rattling 5.1 Dolby mixes, director Maras' choke-hold on the audience only tightens, suspense building not to a point of release, but asphyxiating hysteria. Watching the mother (Daphnne Alexander) sucking back tormented sobs as the soldier's finger brushes the trigger is excruciating.

The street level violence that plays out amongst bombed-out buildings is shell-shockingly real and The Palace sets out to shred nerves from its opening moments. Impossibly visceral and immediate, mortar fire plunges us right into the action and sends a roof collapsing down around a family, who have no choice but to flee from their home. The rhythmic pelting of machine gun fire taking chunks out of the buildings and street signs is a constant reminder of the pursuing soldiers as they race across the city looking for shelter. Everything in the sound design is aggressive; the trembling piano notes of Argyro Christodoulides' score reverberating like the ping of bullets. The chase sequence is breathlessly executed and fluid, despite being hand-held—cinematographer Nick Matthews working hard to put an onus on a sense of geography amidst the chaos, something the increasingly self-conscious quick-cut shakes of the Bourne franchise were sorely lacking in and have a lot to answer for, in terms of its influence on the choreography of modern action set pieces. Clearly, Paul Greengrass might stand to learn a thing or two from Anthony Maras.

Once you've settled in as best you can to The Palace's unremitting ballistic assault, the awe-inspiring scale of the production starts to emerge. Rumble-strewn streets are obscured either end by thick, plumes of smoke, rendered in wide shots as little more than contortions of smoldering ruin, hazardous at every turn and treacherously maze-like. Even without bullets whizzing directly overhead, simply navigating the terrain makes the family's journey one which is fraught with peril. Even more remarkable is how this Cypriot-Australian co-production has somehow turned dimes into dollars whilst shooting on locations along the United Nations Buffer Zone in Cyprus. With the majority of short films, we tend to think of projects that reflect their budget, small chamber pieces full of attention-grabbing angles and heavy on dialogue, whereas what we have here is sixteen minutes of non-stop action that rivals the highest Hollywood standards and on more than one occasion surpasses them with blitzkrieg duck n' cover staging.

Not making the grade for Oscar consideration but already generating a lot of buzz on the festival circuit in Australia, if Maras can get this seen by the right people, a transition into high-wire shoot ‘em up political thrillers surely beckons.