Finished in 1997, a gutsy cinema verite look at the battle in the frontlines of the forests of northern NSW between the loggers and so-called ‘feral’ environmentalists. A very personal film because it started when Bradbury woke up to find the serenity and peace he sought, living on the edge of a rainforest in northern […]
Bradbury produced, filmed and co-directed with Richard Mordaunt was about the Byron Shire community coming together to halt inappropriate development. It tracked the struggle over four years of the community to stop developers, including Club Med, making Byron shire into another Gold Coast. This film tells the story of how an impassioned community committed to […]
Bradbury combines his film making talents with long-time university friend and environmental activist, Peter Garrett. Aired nationally on the commercial Seven network, it was instrumental in stopping sandmining going ahead in the largest area of untouched wilderness on the East coast of Australia south of Cape York. Shoalwater: Up for Grabs (1992) saw Bradbury combine […]
The documentary follows Dr John Wamsley’s attempt to acquire a parcel of land in the Grose Valley NSW for use as a wildlife sanctuary. A wealthy man in his sixties with a PhD in mathematics, Wamsley is taking on the conservation establishment. Underneath his famous feral cat hat, Dr John Wamsley is a man with […]
The struggle of the Mirrar people against the Jabiluka Uranium mine. “Jabiluka is about us, blackfellas, whitefellas together…and our belief in the future of our nation.” In 1997, Energy Resources of Australia (ERA) pushed to open a new uranium mine surrounded by the World Heritage listed Kakadu National Park. The traditional Aboriginal owners told the […]
The 1981 murder trial of Alwyn Peter made Australian legal history when his defence lawyer successfully argued that charges of murder and manslaughter were inappropriate for dispossessed, semi-tribal Aborigines. In December 1979 at the Weipa Aboriginal Reserve on Queensland’s Cape York Peninsula, Alwyn Peter killed his girlfriend Deidre Gilbert. She was 19. He was 22. […]
David Bradbury’s documentary examines how the political and economic struggle in Central America is expressed through the music of the people south of the border, from Mexico to Managua. The United States has always liked to call the shots South of the Border. In Central America where the press is censored, the radio and TV gagged, […]
A portrait of a brutal military dictatorship made during a three month visit to Chile in 1985 by David Bradbury. This powerful documentary traces the 12 years from 1973 to 1985 of General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship and whose forces seized power in a bloody, US-backed coup. Marxist president Salvador Allende was left for dead and […]
In 1979 the revolutionary Sandinista movement came to government after 43 years of organised resistance and the death of 50,000 Nicaraguans. They inherited a country bankrupt and with a foreign debt of US$1.5 billion. Through the central figure of leading Sandinista Tomas Borge, David Bradbury examines the past, present and future of this small Central American […]