57 Lawson

57 Lawson is a drama-documentary hybrid film that fixates on the nature of the everyday life of the tenants living in a social housing estate in Redfern over the course of one evening. Defiantly slow-paced, 57 Lawson is an act of preservation: it is an archive of a building, and of a city - its structures, traces, faces, bodies, sounds and images that are slowly becoming obsolete.

"★★★★... Documentary and drama intertwine, but the outcome is a particularly cinematic truth"

- Craig Mathieson, The Age

"Top 5 Films...an assured exercise in minimalism"

- Jake Wilson, Sydney Morning Herald

"57 Lawson has aged as an important archive of a brief period of time, a lyrical tribute to Australia's often ignored lower class population...a fascinating entry into Australia's distinctive body of social documentaries."

- Alex Lines, Film Inquiry

“the director’s docu-drama masterfully draws upon the objective observational cinema of Chantal Akerman, Chris Marker and Frederick Wiseman in examining the inevitability of change while archiving the latest redefinition of the role of ‘people’ in the city landscape ”

- Simon Foster, Screen Space

“the rawness, the stillness, is mesmerising...The pragmatic reality of these scenes against the poetic quietude of earlier scenes gives the film its poignant narrative about people who are invisible until they become inconvenient. ”

- Rita Bragovich, Altmedia

“Brimming with heart and humanism, the film also operates at the very intersection of reality and fiction, pushing the documentary format in a bold, new direction. Singular, visionary and experimental at heart, 57 Lawson sits at the very forefront of documentary cinema. ”

- Stefan Popescu, Sydney Underground Film Festival