Here Out West Rewrites the Negative Narratives That Have Overshadowed the Vibrant Communities of Western Sydney

For a long time western Sydney has been disproportionately misrepresented as being “too dangerous” and “too foreign”. The most recent example was during the Covid-19 Delta outbreak when some of Sydney’s most multicultural local government areas (LGAs) – many of which are located in the western suburbs – were labelled “areas of concern”.

But new film Here Out West, screening on ABC TV and ABC iview on August 14, seeks to normalise the richness of these communities and the individual experiences of those who live in western Sydney by capturing snapshots of people’s everyday lives.

The anthology film, directed by Fadia Abboud, Lucy Gaffy, Julie Kalceff, Ana Kokkinos and Leah Purcell, starts with a story about a middle-aged woman kidnapping her newborn granddaughter (who is being given up for adoption) from a public hospital. The film gently transitions through a series of seven other intersecting stories weaved together by themes of family, identity and resilience.

At the same time, the film showcases a rare, raw and authentic insight into the inherent and common struggles faced by first and second-generation migrants living in Australia. There’s the story about a Vietnamese real estate agent Tuan (played by Khoi Trinh) who trades his Asian identity for an ocker persona at work. Another is about Roxanne (Christine Milo), a Filipino nurse whose family lives overseas, who works a double shift on her birthday.

There’s also the story about three young men and their intercultural friendship. Their story intertwines with another about a mixed-race Bengali woman, Ashmita (Leah Vandenberg), who struggles to understand her dying father as he reverts to his native tongue because she never learnt how to speak Bengali. After overhearing one of the young men speaking Bengali at the hospital, she asks him to help her translate.

The realistic and meaningful nature of these stories is further represented through an appropriately diverse cast and the use of 10 different languages – Arabic, Bengali, Cantonese, Kurdish, Kurmanji, Spanish, Tagalog, Turkish, Vietnamese and, of course, English – a significant amount even by usual diversity representation standards.

Responsible for the diverse, honest and real approach to this form of storytelling are eight screenwriters – Nisrine Amine, Bina Bhattacharya, Matias Bolla, Claire Cao, Arka Das, Dee Dogan, Vonne Patiag and Tien Tran – who are themselves culturally and linguistically diverse. They have each drawn on their own experiences of growing up in western Sydney to create these fictional depictions of common but unseen aspects of Australia.

But Here Out West is still an outlier when it comes to Australia’s filmmaking output and the film makes a clear case that there needs to be more genuine and diverse representation of Australia – both behind and in front of the cameras – especially when the country prides itself on its multiculturalism.

Here Out West is on ABC TV and ABC iview at 8.30pm on Sunday August 14.

This article was updated on July 19.