Crossing All Lines Of Sexual Congress

"It's so nice to be invited to play in Sydney, to premiere the film where we shot it," says Craig Boreham, director of Teenage Kicks, about his film's imminent screening at the 2016 Sydney Film Festival. And it sure was shot around Sydney, Boreham filming in locations including Gunnamatta Park, Cronulla, Rockdale, Dover Heights, Bondi, Little Bay, Botany Bay. "We spanned a lot of the city, across a five week shoot," Boreham says. "We moved around a hell of a lot."

Teenage Kicks marks the first feature for the 46-year-old filmmaker. Boreham came to cinema through a side door: he began as a hairdresser, then worked in wardrobe, set-dressing and production design, eventually graduating to crewing and post-production work. He began making short films in the '90s, and, over the years, kept making them, minus careerist ambition. "I didn't have a burning desire to make feature films, or work in television," he says. "It was just something that I enjoyed doing, and for a long time I was happy making art for art's sake.

"It was just something that I enjoyed doing, and for a long time I was happy making art for art's sake."

"I was always interested in queer stories," says Boreham. "And in the fact that there weren't many. As a gay man, I was searching for those stories, and just felt like there weren't many. So, I felt the imperative to tell those stories because they weren't being told. I was reading a lot of David Wojnarowicz, this post-AIDS poet from the States that I really loved. His stuff was really inspiring to me."

In 2009, Boreham made a short film, Drowning, that took a scene from his budding Teenage Kicks screenplay. It united him with Miles Szanto, his future feature lead, and served as a calling card for getting the full film made. Even still, getting Teenage Kicks to screen was far from easy. "It was a slog. It can feel quite formidable in this country, trying to get a film made — especially when your area is queer cinema, which is seen as pretty niche and really risky," Boreham says. "So, we didn't go through the standard screen organisation funding bodies. We went into the shoot knowing we had the resources to shoot the film, but we didn't have the resources to finish the film."

Still, blessed with a "game" young cast — Szanto, Daniel Webber, Charlotte Best, Shari Sebbens — Teenage Kicks throws itself into a queer coming-of-age tale filled with death, grieving, fucking, drugs, drama and violence, crossing all lines of sexual congress.

"My partner lost his brother quite a while ago now," explains Boreham. "And I was with him while he was going through that period of grief and struggling to make sense of the world in the face of that big a loss. It was quite profound, and I thought that it was something I hadn't seen in stories. So, I was interested in exploring that experience. And I got interested in connecting that to a story of a young man's sexual awakening, and what happened if those things are connected. I feel like a lot of that classic coming-of-age stuff is pretty nostalgic, and I didn't want to just do that. I wanted to have this story of sex and grief be a metaphor for all of that — for the loss of youth, the loss of innocence, seeing the world for what it is, and finding your place in the world."