Chloe Bobbin had the opportunity to interview director/writer, Celina Stang, on her debut feature film Mother Mountain. Filmed on the Eurobodalla south coast at the base of Mount Gulaga, Mother Mountain is a semi-autobiographical deep dive into the fragility of family, sacredness of country, and self-healing. Celina gives us a behind the scenes look on her film and her personal connection to the piece.
The film tackles a lot of challenging themes like intergenerational trauma, the challenges of motherhood, marital and parental disconnect, and even disconnect from self and environment. How was the writing process when developing the script?
A Cathodic one. They’re all things that I am very interested in personally and was sorting through in my own life. When I wrote the film, I was based in Sydney. We spent time at our property in Tilba at the base of Gulaga, but we didn’t move there till COVID, and that’s when we made the film. I was writing, imagining what it was like to live there. Then it was this life imitating art moment where suddenly it was like, well, we are living the life of the film script. And it’s pulling on some autobiographical scenes, but the actual depiction of characters and scenarios are reminiscent of but not actual scenarios of my life. There are similarities but, at the end of the day, the series of arguments are tapestry. Some of it is real and some of it’s not, and some of that just feels kernel of truth.
I was interested in the writing process of viewing the writing with that truth; you get a lot of detail and emotional kind of resonance when you’re drawing on real rationale. Intergenerational trauma was something I was exploring in my own healing to try and understand some dynamics that had existed in my own family as I became a mother. My relationship with my parents and some of the things in the film, like paranoia and control, existed in my world and I was trying to understand them. But we never had that healing that is seen in the film, that was imagined. So that was something I had to kind of work through for myself with trying to fathom why things were the way they were personally in a way that was just functional in my own family, and as a way of finding healing for myself, but also as a Jewish community. I’ve never seen any Jewish families represented in a cinematic setting. I have seen it in American films, but here, nothing’s really talked about.
In the Jewish community, generally speaking, there’s a real sense excellence, over achievement and everything being perfect on the outside. That kind of focus on excellence comes from this Darwinian survival concept from the Holocaust; we have to be strong, we are impenetrable, you know, and my grandmother always used to say if there’s one thing they can’t take away from us is our education. They can take everything; your health, the lives of your parents, but they can’t take what’s in your mind. They can’t violate that space. If we don’t tell those stories, there is no shared moments and there might be a discomfort in the face. It’s an important thing to move through. I mean, the writing is very much about that. Because I’m the first generation born in Australia, my family, my dad’s born in Poland. I am seeking a connection to country because we could have as a family ended up in Canada, America, we have family all over the place. And it was just by chance we ended up here. And you know from being in Narooma that there’s such a strong, vibrant, energetic connection to country that you can get in that part of the world. So, the character was trying to find a sense of identity and belonging through connection to country. Mainly because it’s almost like the connection to Mother Earth becomes something that’s so healing, especially when there is a disconnection in motherhood.
Branching off that; we see the beautiful Gulaga mountain and it’s mentioned a lot throughout the film. What do you feel the mountain in the story represents? What does it embody for you?
The main character battles with insomnia because of the power of the mountain, it’s kind of throbbing in her head and that was something that was very real for me. My relationship to her might sound quite abstract or a bit pseudo spiritual in Sydney, but people really identify with the spirituality that she’s a real entity and a real force. She’s a dormant volcano, so symbolically she is witness to this family living at her feet, and this kind of repressed emotion that’s holding them back from their truth and their connection and their healing. And she brings all that repressed emotion up to the fore until it all explodes. And from those pieces, they find a new way of being and redefine how they are as a family and how they are to one another, and how they are in terms of their own identity. And I guess she’s a catalyst, like a dormant volcano. She’s a provocateur in that way, and it’s not in an aggressive sense. I feel like her energy is very strong, and decisive. I’ve watched her drive away people in my life that she doesn’t like, as crazy as that sounds.
The Eurobodalla is a lot different to Sydney and you do have that heightened spiritual drive in those places of deep natural beauty and history; it’s easy to connect to yourself and environment there.
Yes, and a sense of the safety and a sense of the mystery of things that there are powers beyond human concepts. There’s so many different connections you have to land and animals that are a part of your everyday life that you just don’t have in the city. You kind of see in the beginning this young woman move with her family and she idealistically feels like if she could just commune with nature and be at one, but it’s not. She hasn’t come to it. She has run away to this place rather than gone towards it; she has to deal with her past before she can find that inner peace and connection.
The film does emphasise on that connection to land. Were you able to collaborate with the indigenous people of the Yuin nation during the development of the film?
Absolutely, yes. Even in pre-production, I had a lot of consultation with the community, but we also worked during the production. We had a producer of Yuin origin, Fran Dobbie, and she also consulted a lot of the land councils and community.
We never filmed on Gulaga itself. In the script, we had the characters running up the mountain and we had to obviously not shoot there for real. We actually shot that in Kianga. Initially in the script, we had woven a lot of the dreamtime stories of the mountain and her two sons, but we actually ended up stripping a lot of that back not because we weren’t given permission to use it; we were. I think because I’m Jewish, that the Jewish stories and the Jewish Voice I felt very confident about and I just didn’t feel like it was my place to be bringing the mythology of the Yuin people and focusing on that as the healing. I think that’s subtly in there, there is a presence, but I didn’t feel like it was my place. There was a lot of consultation and I guess I just made choices not to go too much into mythology as a non-Yuin author.
Mother Mountain is full of brilliant performances such as Emilie Cocquerel as Selene, Fayssal Bazzi as Dean, Anne Lambert as Linda, and the brilliant Willow Speers as Shani. How was working with the cast on set?
They were such a supportive and talented cast. Willow, for a child actor, is just ridiculous. She’s almost like an adult in terms of her dedication to the craft and her knowledge of it, even though she’s come from mainly a TV background. We were just really lucky to get some incredible lead professional and intelligent cast members. And as a first-time feature director, it was so important to me to have. I mean, I kind of assemble my whole cast and crew in that way. My DP, Radek Ladczuk, is one of the best in the world. He has shot all of Jennifer Kents films; Nightingale, The Babadook, and The Hater which is a Polish film. And I’ve worked with him before. We had Mark Warner who’s just editing Elvis now, and he won an Oscar for Driving Miss Daisy. So I had such amazing cast and crew. I just really wanted to make sure I was strong hands to learn off them too because I was learning myself on the ground.
I consider myself more of a writer than a director. So that’s where my strengths lie. And so, you know, I wanted to make sure I was in really good hands and Anne Lambert was just incredible. I dreamt of her playing the mother and it was really important to me that the woman playing Linda had a real softness so she’s likeable to the audience so I didn’t create a superficial relationship with these characters. This character is wrong, but there’s all kinds of shades of grey in there. Fayssal was wonderful too. He won Actor Award of The Year while we were filming. Emilie was leading, like it’s a woman’s story, and he was so humble and interested in the women’s story. He’s so close with his mum and I think he’s really interested in women being able to play and tell their stories.
To finish off our interview, I’m going to ask a question that isn’t directly specific to Mother Mountain; what film/s made an impact on you growing up?
I loved all the earlier Jim Jarmusch films when I was a student, and then I was really into Polish cinema. Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique I absolutely was enchanted by that film. I tend to like slower, more European cinema which has a language quality to them. Whilst I was making the film, I was interested in a filmmaker called Alice Rohrwacher and she did a film called Happy as Lazzaro and it’s set in a regional setting in Tuscany. We were interested in how they shot it. It was mainly handheld camera so you were able to get in there and personal which was important to us. We’re dealing with a lot of kids and animals and variables like that that are usually very difficult in cinema settings. So that was something we adopted as well. She’s amazing.
Thank you so much for giving your time to do this interview. It was really nice to hear about your connection to Gulaga and the process of making Mother Mountain. Good luck with all your future projects as well; I hope to see more from you!
Mother Mountain releases in cinema 28th April, 2022.