The result is a film that both looks and feels
remarkably authentic, a fact that’s not entirely
surprising given Green’s commitment to digging
down into her story’s truth.D
ESPITE DESCRIBING THE film industry
as “very competitive and cut-throat and a
little dehumanising ”, Green herself never
considered walkingaway.She was raised in
a creative family in Melbourne, where artistic
expression was encouraged: Green bought her
video camera at 11 thanks to a small inheritance
from her grandmother, spent her adolescence
making short films, and studied film at the
Victorian College of the Arts.
She made her first feature film,Ukraine Is
Not A Brothel, about Ukrainian feminist group
Femen in 2013, having read about them in
a newspaper. “The themes were the same as
those I was exploring in my short films: women’s
bodies and their exploitation in the media.The small details stand out, too. The brightly
coloured bowl of Froot Loops that Jane quickly
gulps down during a rare moment to herself;
the boxes of bottled water she has to repeatedly
open; the scripts she photocopies constantly;
the delicate bracelet she finds by the sofa in
The Boss’s office. Cumulative power comes from
the way in which these moments help us to
understand how deadening Jane’s job is, how
much she relies on routine to get through the
day and, most of all, how a small act such as
finding the bracelet is another step in pushing
her towards her decision to speak up.
Green, who started out in documentaries,
knew those seemingly insignificant details held
the key to her film. “It’s that idea that things keep
coming at her and she’s doing them one by one.
Things feel off and a little disconcerting but she
doesn’t have enough information to join the dots.
Trying to make that clear by showing her going
task by task through her routine was important.” ❯meetings while Jane instead fetches coffee; and,
in one particularly memorable scene, looks after
The Boss’s children after they’re unexpectedly
dumped in the office. It’s a day made up of
countless small humiliations, and one based as
much on Green’s own experiences as from those
of other people.
“I’ve been on the film festival circuit for ten
years and I’ve had my fair share of people kind
of ignoring me or turning away or not listening
to what I’m saying, or making weird gestures
andglances when I’m talking,” she explains.
“Those thingsreally hurt me and dented my
self-confidence. I’d tell my friends about them
and they’d say: ‘Oh, ignore it — it’s nothing —
forget it.’ But really it was the accumulation of
those things that would get to me. I wanted to
demonstrate what that’s like, how those little
gestures and micro-aggressions can really
affect a person’s self-confidence and even their
career trajectory.”
Jane (Julia Garner) has an uncomfortable
conversation with her office’s head of
HR (Matthew Macfadyen).