'Rats In The Ranks'

Name: 'Rats In The Ranks'
Start: 2027-01-16T14:00:00+10:00
End: 2027-01-16T14:00:00+10:00
Location: Wagstaffe Community Hall

About

RATS IN THE RANKS  is a gripping, real-life drama - with a white-knuckle climax - detailing the last weeks of the Leichhardt Council mayoral elections in 1994.
Arms are twisted, favours called in, and there are deals, double-crosses and damaging leaks.
But right up to the vote, no one knows if the numbers will stick.

Over an eleven month period, Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson – two of Australia’s most distinguished filmmakers – gained extraordinary access to the innermost meetings of council participants - including the then current serving Mayor, Larry Hand, and his Labor Party opponents - which privilege provides us with a fascinating portrait of how politics really works.

For example, the then Assistant General-Secretary of the NSW Labor Party, Anthony Albanese, proposed that the Labor caucus at Leichhardt Council should solve their factional dispute over their Mayoral Candidate by "pulling a name out of a hat".

"Ambition, courage, envy, betrayal, disaster, triumph ... in other words, a classic study of politics"

And, it is said that it was larger-than-life Hand's exposure to a wider audience, through this documentary, that spawned the character Col Dunkley in the subsequent, successful Australian TV series Grass Roots.

RATS IN THE RANKS has been screened at more than forty film festivals world-wide, and has won multiple awards including:
* the Silver Plaque for Social/Political Documentary at the Chicago International Film Festival (1996)
* the Critics Choice Award for Documentary at the Sydney Film Festival (1996)
* a Logie Award for most outstanding documentary series/program, following its television screening (1998)