Musical drama that shows another side of troubled Alice Springs is heading for cinemas
By Garry Maddox
It started with a hip-hop song that Alice Springs legal aid solicitor-turned-filmmaker Danielle Loy heard after arriving home from a long day at work three years ago.
Young Indigenous rapper and producer Jacob Harvey had sent her a track called Streetlights, about a time in his childhood when his struggling family had to sleep under a street light in a park to feel safe. He wanted to know if she would direct a music video for it.
Real-life musicians playing musicians: Madison Hull and Jacob Harvey in Under Streetlights.Credit:
“I listened to this song about 1am and I just froze in my tracks,” Loy said. “I was just so moved by its words, its poetry.”
She wrote a film script inspired by the song in three days, then put a proposal to Harvey that changed both their lives.
“I said to him: ‘I’d love to do your music video, but I’d also love you to play the main role in a film’,” Loy said.
The collaboration turned into the musical drama Under Streetlights, which is getting a national cinema release next week after seven weeks in the Alice Springs Cinema and some advance screenings.
Like the acclaimed Irish film Once, it has two real-life musicians starring as musicians trying to make their mark on the world.
Harvey, 26, plays Izak, an Indigenous rapper whose fractured family is dealing with poverty, racism and alcoholism. As well as helping him cope, music is a chance to have a different life.
Becoming great friends in real life as well as on screen: Madison Hull and Jacob Harvey in Under StreetlightsCredit:
Madison Hull, 21, plays Ella, an American-Australian who, with her cop father, is grieving her mother’s death in a car accident. As she finishes high school, music is a way of healing.
The general manager of the Alice Springs Cinema, René Sutton, said the film had been warmly received for showing another side of the troubled town.
“With the added crime and violence around Alice Springs, people are just not wanting to park their cars and come out in the evening, not only to the cinema but to other local attractions [including] restaurants,” she said. “[But] those that see it have got nothing but good things to say about it ... It has so much heart.”
Loy said she could raise only $100,000 for the budget through a combination of crowdfunding, sponsorship and investment, but she had been doggedly determined to make her debut feature film.
“These are the stories that we need to hear from this region,” she said. “Stories of resilience and survival and, not only that, thriving – coming through something and becoming something else.”
Instead of casting established actors, Loy thought it would be more authentic if Harvey and Hull drew on their own lives and music.
“The whole idea was not to act,” she said. “It was to be yourself. All I did was support them to feel safe enough to tap into parts of themselves that were real. As we went further along the journey, more of the real poured into the fiction and the lines became very blurred.”
Harvey, who works as a First Nations mentor for employment provider Workways, said it had been almost overwhelming watching Under Streetlights with an Alice Springs audience.
“When I went to the cinema, seeing everyone there and our faces on the posters, it was very emotional,” he said. “I spent about five minutes in the bathroom just tearing up.
“It was one of those moments where it was like, I used to walk these streets and come into these cinemas and now people are coming to view our film.”
Hull, who moved from Denver, Colorado, when her dad accepted a job in the town more than a decade ago, plays in the indie folk/pop group The Wanted Gems with her identical twin sister, Micaela.
She said there were similarities with another film about Alice Springs teenagers, Warwick Thornton’s masterful Samson & Delilah, but Under Streetlights was different for how it reflected the actors’ lives.
“We didn’t know each other before, so as Izak and Ella become really good friends, that was actually happening in real life,” she said. “People can connect with it because of how true it is.”
After a cinema release that includes a gala screening at Sydney’s Hayden Orpheum in Cremorne on December 12, Hull wants to get on with her music career.
“Our dream is to be full-time musicians, and we’re not stopping until it happens,” she said.
Under Streetlights is in selected cinemas from December 12.
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