City overwhelms in MIFF premiere Mad Rush

A feature premiering at MIFF in August showcases Melbourne’s CBD as the dystopian backdrop to a young woman’s mental decline as she confronts economic insecurity and is pursued by scammers and self-doubt over a 24-hour period.

Made with support from the MIFF Premiere Fund, Mad Rush is an “Alice in Wonderland-esque” film about a young woman, Madisha, who is lost and “trying to forgive herself and her past mistakes whilst battling financial instability, job insecurity, and all the aspects [of life] that us younger generations are coming up against,” 29-year-old writer-director Maddelin McKenna says.

Through gritty streetscapes and unsettling angles, the film creates a sense of estrangement, surveillance and Madisha’s paranoia.

After she “falls down the rabbit hole” of a scam – something that happened in real life to a friend of McKenna’s – Madisha “meets all these different characters, and “her reality sort of starts warping and twisting and turning, and she goes a little bit mad,” the director says.

Shot in 10-and-a-half days, with the cast and crew “moving very fast”, the very low budget production involved Madisha following “a rough track” west to east through the CBD from the Southern Cross end of Collins Street to the steps of Parliament House, taking in locations including the Gothic Bank, Hardware Lane, Flinders Lane, the Flinders St underpass and the Department of Treasury and Finance building.

“We were all over the place,” McKenna says.

“And it was full on. It was go, go, go.”

The director, who grew up in Eltham, still finds the noise and busyness of the CBD challenging at times, and frames the city in her film as a “kind of overwhelming force”, with the wintry conditions it was shot in playing a role.

But as Madisha struggles against the scammers and a money-focused society, beautifully real characters cross her path – a Mauritian Uber driver, played by Bert La Bonté, and a couple who clean churches – bringing warmth and hope to her desperate situation.

McKenna says the roles in the film were all played by people she knew, with the lead, Senuri Chandrani, the least known quantity initially.

“But I just had a really great feeling about her and thought that she would be amazing for the lead role,” she says.

Other actors included her brother, William, a “rising star” of the stage and screen who has appeared in Heartbreak High and the Melbourne stage show of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, as well as her mum, Michelle, a performer and singer, who McKenna remembers from her childhood often dressed in a bear suit or Cheshire cat costume for a pantomime.

Her maternal grandmother was an opera singer and in fact on both sides of the family McKenna is “surrounded by a lot of people who perform and who do music”.

“I grew up around it in a small humble way,” she says.

But no-one else does writing and directing.

While Mad Rush is her first feature, McKenna has made several award-winning short films and took part in the MIFF Accelerator Lab program for short films.

That was such a great program, and for MIFF to now support my feature film as well is really amazing to me, she says.

Mad Rush is one of six MIFF Premiere Fund films and 25 titles altogether named in the festival’s “first glance” announcement in the second week of June.

Another local world premiere is drama series The Airport Chaplain.

Set at Tullamarine and based on the airport’s real life chaplain, it stars Hugo Weaving and Shabana Azeez.

Among other MIFF Premiere Fund films are documentaries about Perth alt rock band Jebediah (Jebediah: Are We OK?), a mixed-gender para-ice hockey team from WA (The Garden Island Pirates) and an indigenous fight to preserve sacred knowledge and protect the forest in the Ecuadorian Amazon (Death of a Shaman) as well as a drama about a young trans man trying to fit into a remote country town (Sweet Milk Lake).

A highlight festival special event at the Arts Centre, Hear My Eyes: Memento, will see restored 2000 cult thriller Memento reimagined with “a blistering live score” by Michael “CAVS” Cavanagh from King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, set to be performed “across multiple drum kits and a suite of electronic instruments”.

The full MIFF program, set to be announced in early July, will include more than 300 films.

The festival opens on August 6 and runs until August 23. •