Persons of Interest: The Independent Film Work of Haydn Keenan and Esben Storm

Esben Storm (1950–2011) and Haydn Keenan (1951–) met each other at University High in Melbourne in the late 1960s, going on to produce a series of award-winning short films that demonstrated their unflinching and fiercely independent approach to cinema. Emerging just prior to the official launch of the “revival”, their low-budget first feature 27A (1974) – produced by Keenan and written and directed by Storm – is one of the major films of its era. Receiving acclaim at the Sydney Film Festival, it also won the AFI Awards for Best Fiction Feature and Best Actor. Featuring an extraordinary lead performance by Robert McDarra, it established Keenan (the youngest producer to ever win the AFI award) and Storm as two of the key young voices in Australian cinema.

Although they maintained a close relationship, Storm left their production company, Smart Street Films, to make his follow up feature In Search of Anna (1978). Across the rest of his career, he completed two further features but mainly worked on television shows including Round the Twist (1992-2001) and Kick (2007). Keenan went on to direct and produce short films, documentaries, TV movies and two fiction features, Going Down (1982) and Pandemonium (1987). Although not widely seen at the time, Going Down is now regarded as one of the most vibrant and underrated Australian films of its era and provides a fascinating portrait of inner-city Sydney in the early 1980s.

Keenan’s career has sustained Smart Street Films as one of Australia’s longest-lived production companies. His subsequent work has included documentary portraits of Reg Mombassa, Ross Hannaford and Aboriginal activist Sam Watson. He also wrote and directed the important documentary series Persons of Interest (2014), exploring the declassified ASIO files of figures such as Frank Hardy and Gary Foley.

This program celebrates the tenacious work of Storm and Keenan by screening recent restorations of their two most celebrated features, 27A and Going Down.