Sweet, Sour and Spicy Country: Isolation as Performance in Warwick Thornton's 'The Beach'

Blurring documentary and fiction, Warwick Thornton's six-part television series sees the Indigenous filmmaker retreat to a makeshift dwelling on the picturesque northern Western Australian coast to cook, tell stories and pass the time in quiet contemplation. As Kenta McGrath finds, the show – which was filmed before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but released in the midst of it – carries immediate resonance in its minimalist focus on isolation, subsistence and healing.

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