In The Face Of Trauma, Kim Farrant Felt Alive Through Sex

Kim Farrant’s debut narrative feature, Strangerland, marks Nicole Kidman’s first leading role in an independent Australian movie since 1989’s Dead Calm, the Phillip Noyce film that took her to global stardom. “It was amazing to have her come on board, and be so supportive of me and the script,” Farrant says. “And when you have an Academy Award-winning actor in your film, it undoubtedly takes it to a much higher level profile on the world stage.”

The film premiered at Sundance in January, and then locally at the Sydney Film Festival. In it, Kidman and Joseph Fiennes play parents whose two children disappear into the Australian outback, and whose differing responses to the trauma reflect “how we act out in times of crises”. Screening it, then, has resulted in a run of responses bordering on therapeutic. “Showing it to people, having conversations with people, seeing how it triggers things in them, and brings up their shit, it’s been great,” Farrant laughs.

"There was also a hope for a connection, however fleeting, with another person, although I probably just needed a hug as much as anything else."

The idea for Strangerland was born in a time of trauma. Following the death of her father in 1993, Farrant moved to New York, where she knew no one, and felt compelled to “act out sexually” as a way of processing her grief. “There was this real sex and death connection, wanting to feel alive in the face of death. There was also a hope for a connection, however fleeting, with another person, although I probably just needed a hug as much as anything else. But, also, there’s also a sense that sex can help bring you back a sense of control and power where you’re feeling quite powerless, lost in the throes of grief. When I looked back at that time, it was fascinating to me, and it sat with me for a long time.”

Working with screenwriter Fiona Seres, Farrant transposed these ideas into a screenplay; Strangerland chronicling fucking as coping mechanism. “The ideas intrigued people, but there was definitely a confronting nature to it. It’s definitely more common – or at least more acceptable – in our society for men to act out sexually. [And] sexuality brings up so much stuff for people, not just culturally but physically… That’s where we had to go and keep rewriting, to get to the point where people could stomach the challenge that we were throwing at them. Because, at times, it’s quite a stark mirror we’re presenting to people, it very clearly puts under the microscope the ways in which we avoid feelings.”

This psychodrama plays out against Australian cinema’s eternal backdrop, the outback. It looms, as ever, threatening and malevolent.

“We were interested in tapping into a white mythology, a white anxiety, about the bush. From colonials through subsequent generations, there’s been this repeated history of not honouring the land, not listening to the land, not valuing the land, and, then, when the white children would go missing, it would trigger this white guilt, about living on stolen land, that the land was somehow punishing us by taking our children.”