Hunt Angels (ATOM Study Guide)

The day struggling, low-budget director Rupert Kathner met ex-barmaid Alma Brooks in 1939, they began a movie-making spree that took on the powerful cinema conglomerates, a police commissioner, the cultural cringe and a police posse all in their passionate pursuit to make the great Australian film. And they left behind a legend known only to a few.

Together they shared a vision they never let go of – that one day Australian stories would shake cinemas around the world. To achieve this end, they were willing to stop at nothing. They conned, charmed, cheated and stole to make their movies. One detective called them 'crooks by day and flies by night' and commented that 'we had orders to stop them at all costs, but you couldn't help but like them'. The story reads like fiction, but it's all true.

Amazingly, their films have survived. Through eyewitness accounts, archival film, dramatized recreations, scenes from their movies, photographs, newspapers and confidential police files, the inspiring true story of our cinema outlaws can now be told.

Hunt Angels (Alec Morgan, 2006) uses a range of innovative digital composite techniques whereby the characters come alive in the real world of Sydney in the 1930s and 1940s. The performances are filmed in period settings and against green screen, the choreography of movement and lighting having been matched to background elements, and then inserted into striking black and white archival photographs which have been manipulated to appear as three dimensional space. Hunt Angels is a film about the passion behind movie making and the importance of national cinemas retaining their voice in a world dominated by Hollywood.