A Word with Claire Cao
Still from Claire Cao’s segment, ‘Closing Night,’ from Here Out West. (Image credit: Bill Green)
‘Closing Night’ is one of eight segments featured in the latest anthology film, Here Out West. A love letter to ‘the ever-changing melting pot’ of Western Sydney, the Screen Australia-supported project spotlights eight emerging writers and their diverse takes on what it means to live in Western Sydney, including Vonne Patiag of Halal Girls fame, and Bengali writer Arka Das. The Western was privileged enough to chat with Chinese-Australian critic and essayist, Claire Cao. Hailing from Canley Vale, she describes her work with Here Out West as an experience unlike past projects in her writing career.
Claire recalls the moment arts support hub Co Curious opened their call-outs for the film project. Around this same time, she’d been published in literary journals as a film critic, editor, and fiction writer. ‘The call-out was open and very inclusive to Australian writers,’ she states. ‘I do work on screen projects in my personal life, but Here Out West is kind of my first actual screen credit.’
For the project, which centres on nurturing a multitude of diverse cultures and voices, Claire describes the writing process as a deeply collaborative experience. ‘We did come in with our own stories,’ she describes, ‘but we were in the room together the whole time, so we had to come up with the connective tissue and help each other out with the story beats.’ In these collaborative experiences, themes and motifs would appear organically in each writers’ segments - including generational relationships, and cultural experiences between migrants and second-generation diaspora. ‘Western Sydney is such a huge region,’ she continues. ‘I think there’s a lot of difference, but all those residences came up naturally and organically.’
The final instalment in the trilogy, ‘Closing Night’ explores the strained relationship between Angel and her Chinese mother, Winnie. Tensions simmer when the two women disagree with each others’ plans for the future - Winnie sets her eyes for a new square of land for retirement, while her daughter plans to move to Melbourne with her boyfriend Eliot.
Claire describes ‘Closing Night’ as ‘personal more than it is autobiographical.’ She acknowledges how her real-life experiences inform numerous elements of her story, including her father’s takeaway shop, and the women in her family - her mother, aunts, and cousins. ‘It’s definitely based on my experiences,’ she reflects ‘but I would say it’s also this element of me imagining what this situation would be like.’ She further recalls consulting with her family on the interpretation of events and experiences, namely to recollect memories of the takeaway restaurant and make corrections to her screenplay’s Cantonese dialogue.
As a Chinese-Australian, Claire also carefully considers how she represents her culture across her writing, especially for ‘Closing Night.’ ‘My actual inclination is to write about Chinese characters,’ she explains. ‘It’s difficult when you’re, like, not super represented, or it’s not common to be a writer in your background, because you start feeling pressure to represent them in a good way, when the relationships you know in real life are kind of messy.’ While Claire is aware of the responsibilities and ethics surrounding cultural representation, she reminds herself that her representations are honest nonetheless. ‘[I’m] making sure I’m not playing stereotypes, and representing them as truthfully and in their complexity as possible.’ Claire also praises Gabrielle Chan, the actress playing Winnie, for shaping the motherly character into a more textured and complex portrait of the Chinese mother figure.
‘I’m making sure I’m not playing into stereotypes,’ writer Claire Cao laments. (Image credit: Nicole Wong)
Here Out West opened and screened at Sydney Film Festival last year, and Claire describes the thrill and excitement of seeing familiar faces in the audience - she smiles as she laments on seeing high school mates at the Ritz Cinema. What was especially significant about ‘Closing Night’ was how audiences resonated with Winnie and Angel’s fraught mother-daughter relationship, relating to themes of finding independence while being tethered to their migrant parents. ‘People from different cultures all have certain dynamics with their mother that [they] resonate with. It’s quite a messy relationship - it’s like loving, but also imperfect.’ Claire also mentions how viewers praised the film’s linkages between food and diaspora. Although the Chinese-Australian writer recognises this as a common trope among diasporic writing, she acknowledges how restaurants can reflect migrants who are working to ‘consolidate their financial security’ in a new homeland, while also elevating themes of hope and nourishment.
When questioned on the future of Western Sydney’s movement in the arts, Claire comments. ‘I think it’s been happening. It hasn’t really been acknowledged by the mainstream [before].’ She nods to The Western’s own coverage of the local music scene, as well as Sweatshop’s commitment to platforming writers of colour. ‘We’re here, we’re creating art, and it’s only [now] the mainstream is finally starting to notice.’
Actress Gabrielle Chan pictured in the centre, who helped elevate and shape the character Winnie in Claire’s original script. (Image credit: Bill Green).
However, Claire recognises that creative tensions can arise when such under-represented pockets of Sydney are elevated to larger platforms. To represent Western Sydney in the most authentic way possible requires creative control and authority from those who have lived and breathed the experience. The writer praises Here Out West for offering a model of filmmaking that platforms emerging artists from the West, while also promoting a more communal element to the filmmaking practice. ‘We were involved in every stage of the production,’ she says. ‘It’s not typical for writers to be talking and reflecting with the costume people, the production people, having a really close relationship with our directors and how we wanted [our segments] to look.’ She hopes for this model of filmmaking to continue, so that ‘creators from our city can continue to create more art outside the mainstream.’
‘Closing Night’ will be featured alongside seven other segments in Here Out West, releasing in Australian cinemas nationally February 3 2022 and on ABC later this year. Stay tuned for a full review of the film this coming weekend!
