My favourite road on the Fleurieu Peninsula runs for twenty miles, through gumtrees and farmland, from Yankalilla to Victor Harbor. On a drizzly evening earlier this month, I travelled with friends down the Inman Valley Road to Victor Harbor for an early dinner and a movie night.
The Victa Cinema first opened in the spring of 1923 as the Victor Theatre. Destroyed by fire in 1934, it was subsequently rebuilt in the Art Deco style from designs by Adelaide architect Kenneth Milne. It was also substantially enlarged, and ever since, it has been a popular regional cinema that is now heritage-listed. We don’t get over there often, but the One & Only and I love this attractive local cinema with its friendly staff, comfortable seats, acres of legroom, and old-fashioned charm.
So, I must tell you about the movie we saw last week. ‘A Boy Called Sailboat’ is a beautiful film written and directed by Cameron Nugent and filmed in Silver City, New Mexico. Cameron came along to this special showing of his movie and took time to talk with the audience about how it came about.
The story is loosely based on a piece he wrote when still at school, although he re-located it from Melbourne to New Mexico. (Oddly enough, the landscape could just as easily have been northern South Australia.) It follows the young son of a dirt-poor Hispanic family, who have inexplicably nicknamed him Sailboat, probably due to an early obsession with boats, despite living so far from the sea.
This is Nugent’s debut as a director, and his movie is a delight. Quirky and whimsical, the story is a simple one: young Sailboat finds a ukelele in a junk pile and teaches himself to play on his ‘little guitar’. Eventually, he makes up a special song for his grandmother, who is lying ill in hospital. The twist? The audience never actually hears the song. Instead, we watch the reactions of his listeners, which suggest he has uncovered a very special talent for music, and writing heart-felt lyrics that strike a deep chord with all who hear it.
Nugent told us that, after testing numerous child actors for the three main roles (Sailboat, his best friend Petee, and his wannabe girlfriend, Mandy) he eventually resorted to using kids from the local school. They are all superbly unselfconscious and appealingly unsophisticated.
The original score was written and performed by the Armenian Australian classical guitarists, Slava and Leonard Grigoryan, known professionally as the Grigoryan Brothers, who actually performed live for this event, which made the whole experience extra-special.
‘A Boy Called Sailboat’ is a lovely family movie that moves along gently. Set in a drought-ridden and economically depressed part of southwest America, Sailboat and his parents live in a lopsided, ramshackle cabin in the desert. Sailboat (Julian Atocani Sánchez) is about eight years old , so named because, despite living hundreds of miles from the sea, he has a passion for boats, which he draws incessantly and pins up on his wall. His tattoed father, José (Noel Gugliemi) – who is as soft as butter despite his mafia-like appearance – is likewise mad about horses, which he endlessly paints by numbers at the kitchen table, while his wife Meyo (Elizabeth De Razzo) spends her days cooking meatballs and stepping gently so as not to cause the house to collapse. Sailboat, meanwhile, creates a song on his ‘little guitar’ for his beloved ‘Abuela’ so wonderful that anyone who hears it can’t stop weeping. The song brings hope and joy to the entire town, a message to the world about the magic of good music that never grows tired.
The film won Best Feature at the 2018 San Diego International Film. It is one that I will definitely be watching again. If only for those delightful moments of humour: Jose’s car with no back doors; Meyo’s ever expanding pots of meatballs; Mandy’s eccentric outfits; Petees eyedrops; Sailboat’s fascinating with a boat ‘for sail’ in the middle of the desert…