Serhat Caradee

When Australian writer-director Serhat Caradee took his short film Bound to the New York University International Student Film Festival back in 2001, the feedback he got about Australian movies seemed to revolve around the same old titles: ”Mad Max”. ”Crocodile Dundee”. ”The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”. And the more time Caradee spent in New York, the backdrop for some of his favourite films (such as Martin Scorsese’s ”Mean Streets” and ”Taxi Driver”), the more he realised “there wasn’t a film coming out of Australia about a marginalised group of people”.

With that in mind, Caradee began work on the screenplay for his first feature, ”Cedar Boys”, upon his return to Australia. The story of three Lebanese-Australian friends who are tempted by the promise of money and a ‘better’ life into crossing over to the wrong side of the law, it’s a tough, compelling film that displays Caradee’s formidable talents as a writer and director. However, it was a long road for Cedar Boys from the page to the screen, with the filmmaker running into the usual obstacles that face low-budget Australian productions but also benefiting from positive feedback and reinforcement within the industry.

By 2005, Caradee says, the development of the film was being pulled in a number of different directions. “One producer said to me that he was more interested in telling a different kind of story, so if I wasn’t going to change the script in that direction then I should maybe find another producer,” he says. “I started to wonder whether I should give in or keep fighting to make the movie I wanted to make. It was around that time that Joan Sauers, a reader from the Australian Film Commission read the script and she just got it – she understood the message of it, the themes of it and what I was trying to say. That just saved it. If I hadn’t had that feedback, we wouldn’t be talking now.”
Validated by this positive response, Caradee moved ahead, fashioning ”Cedar Boys” in line with the vision for the film he’d pieced together from his own experiences and “basically keeping my ear to the ground, listening to stories and anecdotes”.

“From 13 to 17, I played Rugby League with a lot of Lebanese boys, and later I spent a bit of time around cars and clubs,” Caradee says with a laugh. “The personality traits of the three lead characters in Cedar Boys are actually based on a couple of friends of mine, and the rest of the story came out of my research. I’m very influenced by European cinema so I really tried to capture that kind of tone, whether it’s in the storytelling or the look of the film or the acting. The actors came around to my house on a Sunday night for five weeks before we started shooting and we watched films that gave them an impression of what I wanted in Cedar Boys. I told them at some stage that without their performances I wouldn’t have a story. If I didn’t have a story, I’d have a film clip. And I didn’t want to make a film clip, you know what I mean?”

The Cronulla riots of December 2005 – “which put a lot of focus on Middle Eastern youth,” says Caradee – also provided some degree of inspiration. “Looking at the media coverage of that, I thought ‘We need to give these guys a voice, we need to know why they do what they do and understand how they perceive the world’,” he says. “It’s unfortunate, the parts of local Middle Eastern culture the media chooses to focus on. I wanted to provide a bit of insight, so the next time someone gets shot in a drive-by or whatever, someone might wonder about who that person was and how they ended up there. I hope as a filmmaker that I’ve achieved that, while giving the audience an interesting and entertaining story as well.”

Cedar Boys opens in selected cinemas July 30.

– GUY DAVIS