Australians seem to be genetically obligated to have a certain type of conversation. It starts off casually—someone brings up a movie shoot, a festival lineup, or a location scout’s choice—but within minutes, it turns into the usual Sydney vs. Melbourne trench warfare. Two towns. One country. An argument that just keeps going and going.
The latest place where this old rivalry can be seen is in movies. And the battleground is more open than most.
Sydney has looked good her whole life. You can see right away why international productions keep coming back if you walk along any part of the harbor at golden hour. The Opera House, the bridge, and the way the water reflects light in Sydney make it almost too easy to take pictures. The city is shiny, which makes it a good place for some kinds of stories. Aspirational and broad. If you’re being honest, sometimes a little shallow. There are times when Sydney looks like a movie set that forgot to give the characters a personality.
Melbourne usually speaks out loudly against that reading. People from the south say that Sydney only sells beauty and Melbourne has something important to say. There have been more low-budget, genuinely strange, artistically interesting productions in the laneways than in Sydney’s harbor in decades. Yes, those much-mocked and much-celebrated laneways. Cinematographers seem to like the rough edges of inner Melbourne. This city makes it seem like a movie about being alone or making a mistake would be realistic. In contrast, Sydney can make even sadness look like an ad for tourism.
In the eyes of the institutions, the rivalry is real. There are important film festivals in both cities. Both cities have well-established production infrastructure, but Sydney has traditionally gotten more studio money, especially from American shows looking for stand-in locations. In the meantime, Melbourne has become known as the place where Australian filmmakers really want to work, where the industry doesn’t feel like a satellite operation but like something with its own center of gravity. It is hard to say if that reputation is fully deserved or if it is part made up. It’s most likely both.
It’s interesting how much this matches up with the bigger cultural disagreement between the two cities. Melbourne has always thought of itself as the serious city, full of art, ideas, hard coffee orders, and a quiet dislike of anything that seems too commercial. This way of putting things makes Sydney shrug, mostly because it’s too busy being Sydney to really care. In the movie world, this tension shows up in which productions each city gets, what stories are told against what backdrops, and, perhaps most importantly, which cities’ filmmakers are making lasting work.
Still, it’s not clear which city is winning that bigger argument. Australian film has made great work that is rooted in both Sydney and Melbourne and in neither. A lot of the country’s most unique films have been made far from both cities, in places that make the Sydney-Melbourne debate seem a bit provincial. Even though the competition is very intense, it seems to take attention away from the bigger question of what Australian film wants to be.
The fight is still going on. You can’t stop now because it’s too old and fun. A producer is pitching a harbor-front drama somewhere in Sydney. A director in Melbourne is adamant that the laneway version is the real deal. Both are likely partly right. It works like that most of the time.
