“To all those who said we couldn’t do it – get stuffed!”: 27A

Esben Storm¹  and Haydn Keenan first crossed paths at University High School in Melbourne in a cohort that also included future luminaries of Australian cinema, Philippe Mora (who would go on to direct Mad Dog Morgan, 1976) and Peter Beilby (later co-editor of Cinema Papers).² In 1969 Storm enrolled in the film course at Swinburne Technical College, under the tutelage of filmmaker Nigel Buesst, where he studied alongside Gillian Armstrong (later the director of My Brilliant Career, 1979) and Malcolm Richards (who would work camera on The Man from Snowy River, 1982). At this time Storm and Keenan also formed Smart Street Films. Their first film was the 25-minute short, Doors (1969), directed by Storm, starring Keenan, and with Richards on camera. Following this, Keenan directed the 29-minute short One Man Bike (1971), with Storm acting and Richards again behind the lens. Despite roles changing from project to project, the focus of stories on the plight of isolated individuals in society remained consistent. 

Their early collaborations quickly drew attention on the festival circuit. At the 1972 Sydney Film Festival, In His Prime (1971) and Stephany (1972), directed by Storm and Keenan respectively, both won awards, signaling the arrival of Street Smart Films on the Australian independent film landscape. In His Prime is emblematic of Storm’s concerns: it follows a migrant who, after integrating into Australian society, finds himself once again isolated when he loses his job. The film’s focus on the vulnerability of people on the margins directly anticipated the company’s first feature, 27A, released in 1974.

Press updates on 27A’s production indicate the anticipation surrounding the company’s first feature length film.³ The idea for the film itself came from a newspaper article that Storm had read about Robert Somerville, a man detained in a Queensland hospital in the late 1960s under Section 27A of the Queensland Mental Health Act – legislation that permitted authorities to confine individuals indefinitely. Sensing a story that cut to the heart of systemic power and individual alienation, Storm showed the article to Keenan, producer Richard Brennan, and cameraman Michael Edols, whom Storm and Keenan had met while working at the Commonwealth Film Unit (CFU) in the early 1970s. The group immediately recognised its potential. Storm traveled to Queensland, spent time with Somerville, and returned with a treatment he then wrote into a completed screenplay. Filmmaker Cecil Holmes later joined the project, helping to refine and organise the script for the production.

Financing 27A proved a test of both ingenuity and persistence. Keenan raised $40,000 for the feature, securing $13,000 from the Arts Council and the remainder from the “27A Syndicate,” a group of businessmen who each contributed $1,000, money that could be written off as a tax loss and that involved no long-term debt obligations.⁴ Their application to the Australian Film Development Corporation (AFDC) for an additional $15,000 was rejected on the grounds that the film was not “commercial”. Paradoxically, while gatekeepers effectively agreed that the film “must be made,” they also advised against shooting in three weeks on a $40,000 budget.⁵ 

For anyone tracking the period’s cinematic currents, it is not surprising that 27A struggled to secure pre-production support. Its critique of institutional power and its refusal to flatter audiences stood apart from the era’s crowd-pleasing fare. In the early 1970s, films like Tim Burstall’s Stork (1971) and Bruce Beresford’s The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) gave cheerful, raucous applause to national fantasies of larrikinism and mateship, where drinking was a punchline and a rite of passage to prove one’s manhood. 27A offered a devastating counterpoint: a sober, unsentimental examination of an ordinary man when his self-abuse became a societal issue that he could not control. Unsurprisingly, what made the film essential also made it difficult to fund. And were Australians able to face such an ugly reflection of themselves? 

Filming began 28 February 1973. The original location for the shoot – the Thomas Walker Convalescent Hospital buildings in Concord, New South Wales – fell through just a week before cameras were due to roll. With few options left, the production shifted to the Belmont Park Psychiatric Hospital in the Richmond/Kurrajong district. With no time to secure catering or proper accommodation, the entire cast and crew bunkered down in around 15 tents at or near the asylum location, with actors and technicians sharing sleeping space. The conditions determined the style. As Storm later recalled, the film’s financial limitations demanded a visual grammar of speed and realism, shot on 16mm adding to the grainy verisimilitude of the milieu: “We worked out a film that was very gritty, had to move along, was shot quickly, was very natural and was not grandiose in any way. A lot of it is hand-held.”⁶ 

The story follows Bill Donald, played with remarkable authenticity by Robert McDarra, a metho drinker who, in a moment of clarity, seeks treatment voluntarily – only to find himself trapped under Section 27A of the Queensland Mental Health Act. McDarra who was himself an alcoholic died at the age of 44 in December 1975, leaving an impressive body of work through films and most notably in radio productions for the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC).⁷ At the 1973 Australian Film Institute (AFI) Awards, McDarra’s performance was duly recognised with the Best Actor award, representing one of the most compelling and accomplished acting achievements in Australian cinema of the 1970s. Keenan appears as Jeffrey, a young philosophy graduate whose induction into the institution provides a parallel arc to Bill’s. Where Bill struggles against the institution from within, Jeffrey is fast becoming part of its machinery. Gary Foley had also been cast but had to abandon the production to attend the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra. 

Distribution proved as thorny as financing. Although the exhibition chain Village initially showed interest, they ultimately passed. The film did find appreciative festival audiences – particularly in Perth, where a screening was met with enthusiasm – however festival success did not translate into a commercial release. There were practical obstacles: as a 16mm film, 27A was automatically disadvantaged in a market where cinemas were reluctant to screen anything that didn’t arrive on 35mm. Yet the larger blockage was a matter of mood and risk appetite. By 1974–75, many cinema managers were skeptical about the commercial prospects of Australian features that weren’t broad comedies or genre. Visually, the film sustains an observational style whose understated effects accumulate into something quietly devastating. Routine becomes ritual: pills to wake, injections to sleep. The camera records, rather than proclaims, the cruelty of Nurse Cornish (played effectively by Bill Hunter in his breakout role), a petty tyrant empowered by institutional control. Public “events” staged for the patients echo the existential emptiness of the place. The system contains both those who still plot their escape and those who have ceased to imagine a world beyond the institutional walls.

Critical response at the time was far from uniform. Some commentators recognised in 27A a rare artistic sophistication – a forceful blend of economy, precision, and moral clarity achieved on minimal means. Howard Lehman on the other hand was critical of its aesthetic, dismissing its plain style as “impoverished cinéma vérité,” mistaking the film’s deliberate austerity for a lack of ambition.⁸ Still, it found champions. Sandra Hall, writing in The Bulletin, called the film “disturbing and entertaining,” a pairing that speaks to its ability to engage and unsettle in equal measure.⁹ That such divergent views could coexist is itself a testament to the film’s resistance to easy assessment.

When the film finally surfaced, it screened at festivals in Sydney, Adelaide, and Perth, winning the AFI Award for Best Fiction Film together with the aforementioned Best Actor for Robert McDarra. The AFI Best Film accolade, in particular, was a symbolic vindication of the film’s approach. At the ceremony, Keenan, brandishing the trophy, famously addressed the establishment skeptics with a defiant flourish: “To all those who said we couldn’t do it – get stuffed!”¹⁰ The line, half-provocation and half-victory cry, captured the film’s production ethos: principled, stubborn, and unafraid.

And yet, even with critical acclaim, 27A never secured the commercial release it deserved. Smart Street Films had delivered a work that was, in every meaningful sense, ahead of its time. It offered authenticity without condescension; it refused melodrama and sentimentality; it bore witness to the everyday violence of indefinite detention long before such questions were part of mainstream debate. In doing so, it laid down an aesthetic and ethical challenge that later Australian films would gradually take up.

In retrospect, the conditions that made 27A possible are inseparable from what makes it endure. The tented encampment at Belmont, the last-minute location shifts, the three-week shoot, the hand-held textures – these were production constraints, yes, but they were also the instruments by which the film achieved its tense, unadorned realism. Storm’s insistence on pace and naturalism produced not a rough sketch but a disciplined minimalism. The performances, from McDarra’s dogged, unshowy Bill to Keenan’s unravelling Jeffrey, are pitched to the film’s scale: intimate, unforced, and scrupulously restrained. Michael Edols’s camerawork concentrates on bodies, faces, and corridors with patient horror. The cumulative effect is a portrait of an institution that is neither exoticised nor abstracted – a place at once ordinary and intolerable.

It is tempting to situate 27A purely as a social-issue film, but that would undersell its reach. Certainly, the film addresses the ethics and politics of mental health legislation – especially the peril of laws that permit indefinite detention – but it also speaks to a more general predicament: how authority embeds itself in the routines of care; how the line between treatment and control can blur; how bureaucracies can unmake human beings by demanding that they conform to roles that make sense only within the institution’s own logic. In that sense, 27A belongs not only to the history of Australian cinema but to a broader lineage of films about the carceral imagination – works that try to show, without swagger, how people live under bureaucratic rules designed to keep them obedient, quiet, and indefinitely waiting. Storm and Keenan, working with colleagues like Edols and Brennan and with guidance from figures like Cecil Holmes, built 27A out of workmanlike determination and necessity, and in doing so, they made something that continues to disturb, to engage, and to matter.

27A (1974 Australia 86 mins)

Prod Co: Street Smart Films Prod: Haydn Keenan Dir, Scr: Esben Storm Phot: Michael Edols Ed: Richard Moir Mus: Winsome Evans

Cast: Robert McDarra, Bill Hunter, Graham Corry, Richard Moir, James Kemp, Kris Olsen, Brian Doyle, Richard Creaser, Michael Norton, Haydn Keenan, Gary McFeeter, Tom Farley

Endnotes