NFSA Restores: Sweetie

A divisive debut 

Jane Campion’s strange, painful, funny, uncompromising debut feature has split audiences since its 1989 release. Some experience its unique tone and visual style as profoundly alienating or even grotesque (co-writer Gerard Lee recalls yelling at Campion, 'you’ve ruined the film!' when he first saw some of its idiosyncratic cinematography). Others, like me, find in it something familiar and profound ('It’s like a home from which I can look out upon my personal landscape,' wrote Campion scholar Sue Gillet, a few years after the film’s release). The 'something familiar' certainly isn’t comforting – it leaves, perhaps, the texture of porcelain crunching sharply between the teeth, or the slow dread of tree roots creeping under a house, disrupting the foundations – but the vividness it offers is cinema at its best.  

Cinematic sisters 

To say that Sweetie is about an unhappy family is an understatement. At the time of the film’s release, reviewer Jonathan Rosenbaum compared them to several famously troubled families from classic literature – the Compsons in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the Tyrones in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. He, like many, identified the chief 'problem' of the family as the titular Sweetie, played by Genevieve Lemon. Lemon’s performance is savage, unpredictable, absurd and quite unlike any other – she was cast after Campion saw her performing in a stage play where she was acting the role of a child, and it is the unconstrained childlikeness of Sweetie that makes the performance land. But in the 35 years since the film’s release, more trauma-informed audiences have asked a different question to Rosenbaum – less 'who is the problem?', and more 'Why?' And the clues are there.

A bold collaboration 

Much of Sweetie’s audaciousness has to do with Campion’s key collaborators, Gerard Lee and Sally Bongers. The trio went to film school together, where they collaborated on Campion’s formative shorts – Bongers on Peel and A Girl’s Own Story, Lee on Passionless Moments. He and Campion drew inspiration for Kay and Louis’ relationship from their own unsuccessful romance, which they discuss with frank good humour in a director’s commentary recorded for the Criterion Collection release.  

In the same commentary, the relationship between Campion and cinematographer Sally Bongers contains its own echoes of siblinghood – they reminisce about a collaboration which was sometimes fractious, but which had a firm foundation of safety and shared art-school vocabulary. It allowed them to push each other – and the film’s bold visuals – conceptually further. Bongers offers a pragmatic explanation for her striking style: at film school, the boys would often hog the dollies and cranes, so she trained herself to push the conceptual possibilities of a still frame, experimenting with composition and depth of field. On Sweetie, she and camera operator Jane Castle became the first women to shoot a 35mm feature film in Australia.  

The drama which plays out in Sweetie is inextricable from the unique cinematic space that Bongers creates in her frames. She describes the camera as a 'compassionate witness', while Sue Gillet identifies her approach as a 'deconstructively feminist way of looking'.  In a film that is so much about the unsayable, the unseeable or the unrememberable – that which is known unconsciously but not consciously, that which can only be communicated through symbols, or felt through superstition – the communicative weight borne by these images is immense. 

A new restoration 

The NFSA's new digital restoration of Sweetie began with conservation work on the 35mm original picture negative. The film was then scanned in 4K before being digitally cleaned and restored in partnership with Spectrum Films, while the audio was restored from the 3-track final mix magnetic film. Throughout the process, the NFSA consulted with director Jane Campion, cinematographer Sally Bongers and producer John Maynard to ensure that Sweetie’s return to the big screen is as textured, colourful and distinctive as the film’s original release. Like its title character, who (a full third of the way into the movie) enters by smashing a window, letting herself in, and refusing to leave, Sweetie is a film which takes up residence inside you in all its messy, complicated, gorgeous glory.  

The NFSA restoration of Sweetie premiered at the Melbourne International Film Festival on 23 August 2025. It screens at Arc Cinema in Canberra on 16 September 2025, followed by a Q&A with actor Karen Colston (Kay).

Looking for more? 

• From Sweetie to The Power of the Dog: read a portrait of director Jane Campion
• Watch clips from all the films restored by the NFSA Restores program
• Explore our collection of Australian films that received Oscar nominations

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Main image: Genevieve Lemon as Sweetie in NFSA Restores: Sweetie (Jane Campion, 1989). NFSA title: 1821666