The same week that Warwick Thornton sat down to write the screenplay for his 2009 masterpiece Samson and Delilah, fellow Indigenous filmmaker (and Thornton's wife) Beck Cole began work on her own film script. She broke from it during the ensuing years to work, among other things, on a documentary about Thornton's film, and on the acclaimed series First Australians. But Here I Am never left her completely. Five years on, the finished film will hit Australian screens next week.
The central character is Karen (Shai Pittman), a woman in her 20s who has just been released from a two-year stint in prison in Adelaide, and is determined to make a fresh start. This includes trying to find an honest job (no easy task for an Aboriginal ex-con) and attempting to reconnect with her toddler daughter. The young girl has been in the care of Karen's mother Lois (Marcia Langton), who is far from convinced that Karen has turned (or, indeed, is even capable of turning) over a new leaf.
Producer Kath Shelper has said that Here I Am may be the first film about Aboriginal women in a contemporary urban setting. Writer-director Cole agrees that she was keen to capture the particular experience of urban Aboriginal women. 'I grew up bouncing between Alice and Adelaide,' she says, 'and have always been keen to set a film in Adelaide. I don't speak an Aboriginal language. I live in Alice, but there's so many of us that don't live out in the regions. It's important to represent that.'
In the film, Karen derives emotional support from her fellow residents at an Aboriginal women's shelter in Port Adelaide. As filmmaker Cole cast mostly non-professional actors, based upon their natural suitability for certain roles, or as characters conceived especially with them in mind. (Vanessa Worrall, for example, who plays the shelter's manager, is a psychologist who served as an unofficial consultant on the script before being written into it.) This underscores the film's raw naturalism.
'We didn't do a lot of rehearsals,' says Cole. 'We did read-throughs and talked about the script, but that was it. I was attracted to the spontaneity of the performances. The women get the humour, they get the story without me having to bang on about it, because they've all lived it. None of the women ever asked, "What's my character here for? What did she do? What's her back-story?"