This month’s Bangalow Film Festival will be something of a family affair, with a father and daughter filling two key, but very different, roles, reports Digby Hildreth.
Dad is local filmmaker Mark Lewis, a 40-year industry veteran who is acclaimed for his witty, off-the-wall documentaries, most famously his 1988 study of cane toads that highlighted the more cuddly qualities of the reviled amphibian.
His daughter is Los Angeles-based Molly Lewis, perhaps the world’s most famous whistler, a winner of international competitions, who has performed alongside musicians from Dr Dre to Jackson Browne, and is a recording artist in her own right. She opened for Beck on his recent American tour, collaborated with Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt on the Barbie soundtrack, whistling Billie Eilish’s What Was I Made For?, and fronts lavish gala dinners for the likes of Hermes, Chanel and Gucci. In 2017, by special request, she whistled Danny Boy and Just a Closer Walk with Thee for Harry Dean Stanton as he lay on his deathbed.
Mark is a member of the judging panel for the festival’s inaugural Green Frame Nature Documentary Award – Australia’s first prize dedicated exclusively to environmentally aware films; Molly will play a more visible part, both onscreen, in the opening night film, Whistle, and in a live demonstration of her spellbinding skills.
Watching, or rather, hearing her perform – evoking the haunting soundtracks in the spaghetti westerns of Ennio Morricone – will alone be worth the price of a ticket.
The presence of the two at the festival was purely coincidental, taking even director Christian Pazzaglia by surprise – and delighting him.
“I’m a big believer in this kind of serendipity,” he says. “I love it when things like this happen. It’s a beautiful thing.”
Mark is a Northern Rivers local of more than 30 years standing, and three-time Emmy winner. Many of his myriad documentary films are about nature: his first, Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, was nominated for a BAFTA Film Award for Best Short Film and was for years one of Australia’s top grossing documentaries. It established his international reputation and ushered in a rich and productive career, but its success has also been something of a burden.
Displaying the irony and understatement that characterises his films, Mark says: “Unfortunately, ‘Cane Toads’ is now my middle name.” He has made many films since then, he reports, but it’s the toads everyone remembers.
Despite his output, he is uncomfortable with the description ‘documentary filmmaker’: “You know, my documentaries are fairly different. Nature films have tended to be very conventional, and mine are not conventional in any respect, including the fact that they’re mostly about the human-animal connection.
A few of them are from the point of view of the animal.”
Cane Toads used cameras that were mostly on the ground, looking up at the human interview subjects, and straight on at the toad, giving the species a lot of respect. Yet, despite supposedly being about cane toads, it is really about people, including plenty who admire and even love the animal; their stories are endearing and at times hilarious.
High-brow commentator Elizabeth Farrelly said the film’s approach revealed a filmmaker who loved Australianness “but could also, without slapstick or condescension, take the piss”.
The opening night film, Whistle, made by Aussie Christopher Nelius, shares the same uniquely Australian flavour, both funny and generous spirited.
Christian says when he saw the film last year he thought it would be perfect for opening night at the Bangalow festival, “because I wanted something uplifting, something light.
“I think we’re all quite stressed out these days, and to be honest, people don’t want to see more of it.
“We want to start on a high note, and to close on one,” (with Gaucho Gaucho, a romantic celebration of the cowboys and girls of the pampas).
Whistle is in the vein of Best in Show, documenting an eccentric group of international whistlers, Molly Lewis among them, as they descend on Hollywood to compete in the Masters of Musical Whistling, the world’s most prestigious whistling competition.
Molly is now perhaps the most successful among them. Mark says proudly of his daughter, “she’s a genre of one. Extraordinarily successful. She’s a professional whistler, and maybe the only one”.
Molly’s ability is all her own, Mark says: “I can’t whistle to save myself, I’ve got two left feet, can’t dance, can’t sing, can’t play any instruments. But she was the opposite.” At a very young age she was astonishing dinner guests with her ability.
Christian has an idea to have a whistling competition during the festival, and have Bangalow residents whistling for days during and after the event. Naturally, Molly would be the judge: a panel of one.
The Green Frame Award has been a couple of years in the making, Christian says – and was inspired by the fact that Bangalow has proved “a good home” for environmental and nature films over the festival’s history.
“And we just wanted to go a step further, not only in terms of showing them or giving a bit of money to a winner, but really as a method of getting more people to make these kind of films. Nature docs, environmental films, are really magical in the way that they empower viewers; they bring you closer to nature and you feel emphatically motivated to do something about these issues. The award gives them a spotlight.”
Next year he wants to double the impact, with a three-day industry forum, where “filmmakers, producers, philanthropists, government bodies, everyone, can come and help grow the genre” and help put Bangalow on the national map.
“We’re so lucky around here, that in the hills and on the coast there’s so many amazing filmmakers, photographers, producers that are already producing some of the best work we make in Australia, but there’s no connection. We don’t know they’re there. So this is a way also to bring everything together.”
One of these amazing artists he also learned about serendipitously, through chatting to a friend who happened to mention his brother was Jono Allen.
“Jono Allen! who just won the biggest prize in the world for nature photography (the 2026 World Nature Photographer of the Year Gold Prize and Grand Jury Prize). I couldn’t believe it. And he lives in Byron!” Jono is now on the Green Frame jury alongside filmmaker Molly Reynolds (My Name is Gulpilil), long-time Sir David Attenborough collaborator Chadden Hunter, and screen academic Anne Chesher.
In choosing the five nature films, Christian says he wanted to give a sense of how diverse both nature and the style of making nature documentaries can be.
As a judge, Mark will be looking closely at how the filmmakers use all the different elements at their disposal: the soundtrack, the music, the direction, the camera work. And, of course, an approach that shuns conventionality.