Critics Campus 2025 participant Claire Ollivain speaks to The Golden Spurtle director Constantine Costi on how community, tradition and finding connection amid the capitalist grind informed the creation of his whimsical, heartwarming documentary.

Remember the feeling of curling up in a hidden corner of your school library to pore over your favourite picture book – a universe that always invites you back with another hand-drawn detail to discover? This is the sense of wonder that Australian opera director turned documentary filmmaker Constantine Costi wants us to relive in The Golden Spurtle.

The Scottish Highlands’ Carrbridge is no unremarkable sleepy town. Since 1994, it has drawn competitors from around the globe to the World Porridge Making Championship. Taking its name from the competition’s highly sought-after trophy, The Golden Spurtle offers portraits of the event’s contestants with a compassionate eye. The making of the humble bowl of oats – a workman’s staple that can be traced back thousands of years – is, for the people of Carrbridge, an art that can be refined.

An opera director with large-scale productions such as Il Tabarro, Inferno and Pierrot Lunaire under his belt, Costi is no stranger to the pursuit of perfection usually associated with the ‘higher’ arts. The Golden Spurtle, his first documentary feature, leverages the broad appeal of the genre to democratising effect. The film showcases ordinary individuals’ lives with the same reverence that Carrbridge residents give to a common breakfast food.

According to Costi, who speaks to me over Zoom around the time of his film’s MIFF screening, the porridge is, in reality, “a Trojan Horse for community and celebrating something absurd”. He is preparing to go to the Edinburgh Film Festival while I’m huddled in a conference room somewhere on the University of Melbourne’s campus. The attention The Golden Spurtle has garnered both at home in Sydney, where Costi is based, and overseas, with sold-out sessions at Copenhagen’s CPH:DOX festival (where it had its world premiere), is indicative of audiences’ collective hunger for stories that return us to the warmth of a fairytale told by fireside.

The Golden Spurtle

The Golden Spurtle opens to a field of fresh grass backdropped by distant hills. Rolling percussion and a chiming bell signal the importance of this little patch of unassuming land. Into the frame walks Charlie Miller, the Golden Spurtle’s ‘Chieftain’ – a title more evocative of a clan leader than a contest organiser. Miller describes a painting by Robert Storm Petersen called Back to Nature – shown to us in a montage before revealing its peculiar, didactic whole – framed proudly on his wall. In a uniformly grey crowd of men marching to work, one colourful character veers away to a path dotted with flowers. Fleeing the deadening routine of modern work culture is, in The Golden Spurtle’s moral universe, aspirational. From its first sequence, the film embarks with a whimsy reminiscent of a Belle and Sebastian song.

For the filmmakers, creating The Golden Spurtle was akin to being immersed in the slower-paced mode of living that Costi pins down to the neighbourly values of the village: “We spent half the time having cups of tea in people’s lounge rooms as much as we did shooting a film.” The documentary grew spontaneously out of what Costi called his “genuine rapport and connection” with Miller, whom he met on his first trip to the Highlands before he had any intention of making a documentary. “I sort of got this sense of this artist, both dormant and alive, in him,” Costi says. “Even the way that he runs the porridge competition has so much flair and passion and fun; it’s almost like his canvas.”

For Costi, who was more accustomed to the operatic form’s “artifice”, Carrbridge was unusual in that it required no highly stylised treatment to bring out its innate painterliness. Rather than “impose something” that wasn’t already there, Costi recalls that he and cinematographer Dimitri Zaunders “wanted to capture the picture-book and almost fictive quality [of] the whole place”. Even The Golden Spurtle’s soundscape taps into the novelty of the accent as an inherent, musical attribute drawn from the setting. “The way that Scottish people speak is very lyrical,” Costi says. “There’s accidental, organic poetry and a meter to the way that a certain generation speaks.”

The filmmakers did, however, make aesthetic choices that heightened the town’s look, with romanticised depictions of the Old Packhorse Bridge, the railway station and other quaint rural locations that could be straight out of a Pieter Bruegel genre painting (one of their sources of inspiration). The film’s defining grammar of fixed frames and symmetrical compositions has already drawn countless comparisons to Wes Anderson.

For a society fascinated with the past as an escape from the alienation of capitalist modernity, Costi’s film represents a “pocket of optimism and hope”. And, while nostalgia for the rural can sometimes serve as a dog whistle for conservatism, Costi emphasises the spirit of international community-building and inclusiveness that underlies the competition.

Making The Golden Spurtle led Costi to consider how he can “make opera work with an equal amount of accessibility for a wide audience”. There are no barriers, after all, to the unpretentious porridge. A piece of folklore for the present day, The Golden Spurtle is a spoonful of comfort that its audience might continue to enjoy if they went home and got to know their own neighbours.

The Golden Spurtle screens in Melbourne on Sunday 10, Wednesday 13 and Sunday 24 August and in regional Victoria on Saturday 16, Friday 22, Saturday 23 and Sunday 24 August as part of the MIFF 2025 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.