If you ever get the opportunity to pick up the phone and talk to Sunny Abberton, you will find him to be a really decent and down to earth guy, a bit like he seems in his latest movie Bra Boys. This very personal debut film has been a long time in the making and the 34 year old, first time writer, director and producer admits to being pleasantly surprised by the positive reviews his film has received in the first week of its release.
How long have you been working on this film?
Probably going on five years. Yeah... 2002 I started researching it or even earlier, 2004
A lot of the footage used in the film was shot with a DV Cam. When did you start documenting your life like that?
I turned professional surfer at 15 and from that age I travelled around the world with film crews and made surf travel logs and stuff. We were always filming each other surfing and just always had the camera there so that’s where the footage came from. We could have re-shot say a whole lot of party scenes and scenes but we thought it was best to try and keep the audience as connected to the real characters as we could. I think, a lot of our archival footage worked really well.
What was the original plan and how many times did you change direction, because with documentaries you can't script it can you?
Well I did script that I wanted to tell the story of our struggle. You know, in like, housing commission communities going on in our area and maybe our area was quite unique with the beach but those kinds of stories are going on everyday in thousands of homes across Australia. When I researched the whole history of Maroubra, to look at why and where did this conflict come from? Where did it all start? Why this tribal attitude? I came to understand that it had always been this way. It started from when [Captain] Cook came in with the convicts. He noted Aboriginals surfing in the area and they were banned almost straight away. I just wanted to show that whole struggle, not only of our generation but whole generations going right back to the start. I wanted to take the audience journey on that and then show a local family but then, when the shooting happened, it became our family that we were showing that drama and everything through.
What motivated you to open yourself up like that? It’s a courageous thing to do to turn the camera on yourself!
Well… our story was the exact story of what I was going to show through another family and I was going to be prepared to put the camera on them and show it through their eyes. That's what I mean, we were already filming for six months when the murder happened and then we decided to show our story. So, in a sense it changed but it didn't really change. I was still going to show that whole struggle and the battle to overcome adversity and that's what we're basically hoping the film does. For the kids seeing it, it will let them know that no matter how bad it is at home, or what they're going through, if they can find an outlet to channel their anger and frustration, if that they can find a way out of it, then they can break that whole cycle. So, basically that's what the whole movie is about, from the start to the finish.
