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[Girl in a Mirror] is a riveting portrait of the extraordinary Carol Jerrems, a photographer of phenomenal talent, who documented counter-culture in Australia during the 1970s. Precocious and irreverent, Jerrems mixed with filmmakers, musicians and fellow photographers in Melbourne and Sydney, making lovers of many and recording her relationships with a raw and affecting frankness. Famously, the passionate and self-destructively courageous Jerrems befriended a group of outsider youths - Sharpies - from one of Melbourne's roughest schools. She documented their self-referential world in forensic detail, the sexual menace of these images palpable. From this period came Vale Street, her indisputably iconic image of 70s' youth culture.
Jerrems died of a mysterious illness at the age of just 30, in 1980. She recorded the decline of her ravaged body with the same curiosity and disarming honesty with which she photographed all of her subjects. With the lens trained on Jerrems the artist, Kathy Drayton tells her remarkable story through interviews with her friends and subjects, through her powerful photographic archive and through the words of her diary.
Kathy Drayton and Helen Bowden will be attending the festival. --- D Kathy Drayton P Helen Bowden WS Helen Bowden TD video/col/ 2005/55mins
[Girl in a Mirror] (MIFF 05) is Kathy Drayton's first feature film.
