27A

27A (1974)

A middle-aged alcoholic is sentenced to six weeks in jail for a minor offense. While there he undergoes psychiatric treatment for his alcoholism and is committed to a hospital for the criminally insane for the duration of his sentence. However, under Section 27A of the Queensland Mental Health Act, he can be detained indefinitely until the hospital authorities declare him eligible for release.

Date of release
1974-06-05
TMDB
8.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
1h 26m
Director
Esben Storm

Casting

Interesting facts

27A is a 1974 Australian drama film directed by Esben Storm. At the AFI Awards it won in the Best Actor and Best Fiction categories.

Production

Esben Storm and producer Haydn Keenan had made a number of successful short films and wanted to move into features. The script was developed by Storm in association with interviews he conducted in 1972 with Robert Somerville, a man who had been forcibly detained in a Queensland hospital in the late 1960s. By the time the film was made, however, section 27A had been repealed. Cecil Holmes worked as script editor. Storm:

The main influence on the style of the film was that we knew we wouldn't be able to raise a lot of money... If we wanted to make a feature film, we'd have to make it cheap. There was a style at that time, sort of pseudo-documentary, with a lot of hand-held camera work - Cullodden, Cathy Come Home and Poor Cow, that English, Ken Loach, Peter Watkins realism.

Robert McDarra, who played the lead, was himself an alcoholic. Bill Hunter was cast in his first feature film role. $23,000 of the budget was raised from a syndicate of 18 businessmen, with $13,000 coming from a grant from the Australian Film Television Radio School.

The film was shot on 16mm starting 28 February 1973 at Christian Brothers psychiatric hospital near Sydney.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended