At the start of filming Isla’s Way, director Marion Pilowsky was faced with a problem.

The film focusses on 87-year-old Isla Roberts, but in early interviews Pilowsky was consistently running into roadblocks as Roberts dodged and weaved around questions about her internal life.

“There’s a certain unpredictability to Isla,” says Pilowsky, “which intrigues me, you know? And I thought, over the course of getting to know her, the onion will peel back, the layers will peel back, and it will unfurl.

“And by far the most interesting thing was that it didn’t. What you see is exactly what you get.”

Roberts was particularly uninterested in talking about her sexuality. Although she has lived in the Adelaide Hills with partner Susan for 40 years in a romantic relationship, she doesn’t identify as a lesbian.

For Pilowsky, what initially felt like a potentially insurmountable challenge – the prospect of making a film about a person uninterested in reflecting on their own choices – slowly transformed into a revelation.

The ability Roberts has to be solely herself, without feeling the need to explain or justify, is her special magic and the reason Pilowsky calls the South Australian “quietly political”. While Roberts did eventually offer a few more intimate interviews, exploring her self-contained way of being became a central focus of the film.

“Normally you get a documentary and they’re kind of fabulously impactful or you learn something really intriguing,” says Pilowsky. “And with Isla, what you learn is that having purpose and agency doesn’t always have to be aligned with a kind of militancy. She just is exactly who she is.”

The film canvasses both Roberts’ extraordinary history and her present by following a year of her life. It returns with Roberts to her marital home – a remote sheep station seven hours’ drive from Adelaide in Bascombe Well, where she raised her four children, operated the farm and cared for her late husband, who lived with schizophrenia.

It also chronicles Roberts’ contemporary efforts to continue – against all advice – horse carriage driving long enough to deliver her grandson to his wedding in rural Australian style.

The decision to journey with Roberts through 12 months of her life was inspired by a book –Katy One Summer, featuring photos by Guy Mannering ­– that was a formative influence for Pilowsky.

“It’s a beautiful photographic book of this little girl who lives on a farm, and he just spends a year going through the seasons with this family, but it’s all focused on this little girl,” says Pilowsky.

“And so, when I thought about Isla, I just thought she’s that little girl, but now old. And I thought, it’s kind of Isla in the seasons – I’ll just follow this person through a year of their life. And what I tried to do was almost photographic in nature, really.”

To create a documentary that was both aesthetic and classically observational, Pilowsky worked with long-time collaborators producer Georgia Humphreys and cinematographer David Magarey Roberts.

Magarey Roberts is Roberts’ grandson, and the family bond between crew member and subject allows a level of access to quotidian parts of life that feels unusual.

In bringing Roberts and her story to audiences, Pilowsky and her team were interested in filling thematic gaps in the Australian screen landscape, where both older women – particularly those who don’t fit the “little old lady” stereotype – and rural Australia are commonly under-represented.

“I think that often there are segments of the audience that are overlooked simply because films are not made for them,” says Pilowsky. “The gatekeepers – the streamers, or whoever – have an algorithm that they work on.

“And I guess if they’re not providing [audiences] that kind of content, then the algorithm will say no. So, first of all, you have to provide that content for the algorithm to acknowledge that people are watching it.”

Isla’s Way received post-production support from the Adelaide Film Festival, which will also host the documentary’s World Premiere in a special event on October 21. From November 9, the film will also have a theatrical release, screening through the Wallis Cinemas network.

While Pilowsky is deeply interested in the political and social themes of Roberts’ story, she is equally invested in bringing a life-affirming experience to cinemas.

“I think that it [the film] is about being brave and curious. And that you can take on anything. You just have to do it,” she says.

“And I hope that people realise that just because they lead what they think is an ordinary life, that doesn’t make them any less extraordinary than anybody else.”

The world premiere of Isla’s Way is at 3.30pm, October 21, at The Piccadilly cinema, as part of the Adelaide Film Festival.

This article is republished from InReview under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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