Interview with Tony Ayres

Tony Ayres, the enthusiastic writer/director of Home Song Stories, seems unusually jumping for a weekday breakfast. He speaks at an accelerated pace, as if riding aboard a morning wave of caffeine, or (more likely) simply bursting with ideas and feelings regarding his latest cinematic effort. It comes as no surprise that Ayres has so much to say. After all, Home Song Stories is a film about his own childhood experiences and about a difficult time when, just after his family’s move from China to Australia, his mother’s lifestyle escalated out of control.

“Personally, this was obviously a set of events that shaped my life and profoundly moved me,” he explains happily, obviously now quite used to discussing this difficult past, “As a starting point, as a filmmaker, you have to be affected by your own story. The challenge of making the movie was about taking this profound event, which seems very powerful to me, and turning it into something that would also affect others. I also find it so fascinating how, when you have something that comes from the truth, you can kind of bend the story out of shape. It gives you a bit of tolerance, in terms of the way in which it fits in, because real life doesn’t fit into conventional narrative.”

While certainly not revolutionary, the narrative of Home Song Stories does indeed twist its way through time in an imaginative fashion. This is a chronological collage of memories, viewed through a child’s perspective, but retold and collated by the adult version of that child (based on Ayres himself), who makes fleeting appearances in brief cut-aways and voice-overs. Seen typing the story onto his computer, he is obviously, like Ayres, in search of catharsis. “I was trying to emphasise that the film is being told from later,” Ayres comments, “If there is a theme to the film, it is about a little boy falling out of love with his mother because of her behaviour, and trying to, as an adult, revisit that behaviour and try and find a sense of forgiveness.”

As eager as he is to discuss his mother, Ayres seems taken aback when I steer conversation towards his representation of women. “I think that in terms of her representation there is a truth to her character, which I know to be true because my mother experienced it, but there was definitely no underlying political thesis,” he stresses, “I think that if you want a film to resonate with your audience, you have to find a contradictory truth. If you want to communicate a thesis, you’re better off writing it. I wasn’t making the film as a statement about women, or about the Asian diaspora, or Chinese representations.”

Alive with contradiction, complexity and humanity, Home Song Stories is without question far removed from the predictability of dogmatic cinema. While Ayres still seems weary about accidentally suggesting that his film belongs in such a category, he does add that his film’s very existence reflects a huge shift in attitudes from the 1970s in which it is set. “When the population changes, inevitably more stories like mine will be told, and they will hopefully provide a human face to these diaspora stories,” he suggests, “There will be more stories like Romulus My Father, or Clubland. Those are three stories all about mothers, and all about migrants, and they’ve all come out this year. That’s a reflection of our shifting culture.”

We can only hope that, as our culture continues to shift, it will also continue to reveal more precious tales such as this one, concerned as they are with capturing poignantly subjective memories rather than with pushing trite political agendas. This film makes a perfect addition our ever-expanding treasure trove of recently uncovered Australian stories.