From the Lighthouse

A HSC Enrichment session with Dr Geoffrey Payne on the poetry of John Keats and the film Bright Star (Advanced English Module: Textual Conversations)

Join Michelle as she talks with prize-winning author, Intan Paramaditha, to discuss her novel, The Wandering. Intan Paramaditha was nominated for the Stella Prize in Australia and awarded the Tempo Best Literary Fiction in Indonesia, English PEN Translates Award, and PEN/ Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America. She is the author of the short story collection Apple and Knife and the editor of Deviant Disciples: Indonesian Women Poets, part of the Translating Feminisms series of Tilted Axis Press in the UK. She holds a PhD from New York University and teaches media and film studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. 

Join Michelle Hamadache as she talks to Randa Abdel-Fattah, award winning writer and activist, about her very first novel, Does My Head Look Big in This? Randa will be appearing at this year's Sydney Writer's Festival: https://www.swf.org.au/writers/randa-abdel-fattah/

This week Michelle is joined by Jimmy and special guest, Khoa Tran, to discuss Kaneto Shindo's Kuroneko. Join us as we discuss revenge, class, mythology, identity and whether or not Khoa can make his hair swish like a cat's tail.

This week Michelle is joined by Jimmy and special guest, Khoa Tran, to discuss Antonioni's L'Avventura. Join us as we discuss gender, class, boredom, weird sex scenes, and fight over whether this is a subversive masterpiece, or a tedious exploration of ennui. 

In this week's episode of From the Lighthouse, join Michelle as she talks with Page Richards, director of Hong Kong University's MFA program and prize-winning poet and vaudeville artist. They discuss the changing states and stakes of literary fiction in contemporary times.

Join Associate Professor Jane Messer and Michelle as they discuss Ursula K. Le Guin's speculative short story "Sur" about the group of women explorers who arrived at the Antarctic's South Pole, well before Shackleton. 

Associate Professor Jane Messer joins Michelle to discuss a short horror story by Graham Greene, 'A Little Place Off the Edgware Road' and another short story by Australian writer, Paddy O'Reilly, 'Baggage Claim'. If you'd like to read O'Reilly's short story before listening, her story was published in Overland and the link is provided below.

https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-231/fiction-paddy-oreilly/

Michelle and Jimmy are joined in this episode by Media Arts teacher and film fanatic, Khoa Tran, to discuss, Autumn Sonata, Ingmar Bergman's late masterpiece about the difficult and, at times, destructive relationship between mothers and daughters.

In this episode of From the Lighthouse, Jimmy and Michelle talk about Michael Haneke's 2005 intriguing and enigmatic film Caché.  The film, starring Juliet Binoche and Daniel Auteil, explores the absence of remorse and the relentlessness of memory in the life of French intellectual Georges, charting Georges response as the family start receiving anonymous video cassettes and crayon drawings reminding Georges of his childhood transgression against a young Algerian boy, Majid. The film explores the long shadow of French colonial violence against Algerians and critiques a national response that refuses to acknowledge the past.