How a director’s life-changing trip around the Pilbara became a movie
When Jub Clerc was 14, concerned teachers encouraged her to join a week-long photography trip for teenagers around the Pilbara. The decision to go changed her life.
“It wasn’t so much the camera I fell in love with, although of course I did,” the Nyul Nyul and Yawuru director says. “What I fell in love with on this trip was stepping outside my comfort zone and seeing something different.
Nyulnyul and Yawuru director Jub Clerc was recognised as an at-risk teenager and sent on a photography trip.Credit: Nic Duncan
“Coming from a small mining town, where everyone worked in the mines and never left, you never understood what was out there or even that there could be something else. Seeing the possibilities, that’s what I fell in love with.”
Clerc didn’t realise at the time that she and her travelling companions had all been recognised as at risk. She knows now that she was singled out because her marks had plummeted from As to Es as she managed a troubled home life.
To this day, Clerc has no idea why the others were there. “I thought it was odd that there were naughty kids who were with me, but I never thought that’s what this trip was about. They never asked your feelings,” she says. “There was no kumbaya in a circle. It was just ‘go and take a photo and have fun, then come back in’.”
Clerc has now made her first feature film, Sweet As, an irresistibly warm-hearted story based on that bus trip.
Shantae Barnes-Cowan plays the director’s alter ego, Murra, an Indigenous girl whose mother’s substance use disorder has plunged their home into chaos.
Also on the trip are Elvis (Pedrea Jackson), who tries to seem cocky but is actually too afraid to leave his community after he was beaten up and left for dead by a carload of racists; Kylie (Mikayla Levy), who is under the thumb of an abusive older boyfriend who demands constant texts; and fragile Sean (Andrew Wallace), who constantly thinks about killing himself.
Their problems are all painful issues Clerc has seen up close: “People in my family or experiences I went through myself, that’s all I wrote about. I didn’t try to tell a story I didn’t know.”
Sweet As is also a story of Country, interpreted spectacularly by cinematographer Katie Milwright.
Katie Milwright captured the beauty of Country in Sweet As.Credit: Roadshow
Clerc’s family roots lie in the Kimberley, but the family has lived in the Pilbara, where the director grew up and where the film is set, for generations.
“Culturally, Country is another person, a sentient being and it was very easy to bring that to the centre of the storytelling for me,” Clerc says. “It was never just a background location. It was: ‘What does this land tell me? How does it talk to me, talk to the character, talk to the script and story?’”
Mitch (Tasma Walton), who owns and drives their bus, teaches the teenagers to show proper respect for Country.
“[Mitch says] ‘Just let this trip allow you to be still and let Country talk to you, heal you,’ ” says Clerc. “You know, that’s what it does for us. Traditionally, Country heals us.”
Carlos Sanson Jr from Bump stars alongside Shantae Barnes-Cowan in Sweet As.Credit: Roadshow
Clerc’s childhood, she stresses, was not much like Murra’s. Her mother, Sylvia Clarke, is an actor who toured with the stage production of Bran Nue Dae and was “extraordinary and exquisite, a wild ’60s flower child”.
“I never wanted her to come across as this volatile drug addict,” says Clerc. “I was terrified of that. But she was a bit absent ... and I played on that kind of longing [in the movie].”
The director gave herself permission to amplify the drama: “Bringing it into the present, it had to be much more. There’s a lot more heavy drugs and a lot more displacement. And I thought that story was important. I didn’t want to tell a pretend story about what our kids go through and what intergenerational trauma looks like.”
At the same time, Clerc’s instinct is always to be funny. “I like comedy. Even when I’m writing a drama, it always kind of errs more towards dramedy. Because I think in really hard times, we’re so used to laughing to get through it all. That natural comedic thing is just in my bones.”
Sweet As is essentially a feelgood movie, winning hearts and prizes at the Berlin and Toronto film festivals.
“I don’t like things shoved down my throat,” says Clerc. “I’m not oblivious to the traumas of the world, but the way that I tell it is a lighter way to say these things. Just because it’s me. I do see things with the glass half-full.”
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