The Best Australian Short Film Competition: Rocco Fazzari and Belinda Lopez make ‘The Australian Mongrel’

“How did you get here?”

It’s the open-ended question that inspired co-directors Rocco Fazzari and Belinda Lopez to make their short film “The Australian Mongrel”.

The shortest of the short-listed entrants in The Best Australian Short Film Competition, coming in at two minutes and 17 seconds, the animated piece asked strangers on trains: “How did you get here?”

Some answer with the station they boarded the train, while others open up about the danger, heartbreak and hope of arriving to their new Australian home.

Both children of migrants, Fazzari and Lopez said they had wanted to explore Australia’s diversity in a unique way.

An audio documentarian by trade, Lopez said she had boarded trains across NSW and recorded commuters’ responses to the question — with no context.

“We were both children of migrants, and we’re interested in these stories about how people get here and stay here. But how do you toy with it, without getting into the policy area,” she said.

“I spoke to a lot of people across a lot of trains … I wanted to get a sense of the ‘mongrelness’ of Australia,”

“That’s what this is all about — many modes of arrival and stories, Australia is a mongrel of a nation.”

Fazzari, an illustrator who animated the film, said the question was a twist on something asked of most migrants —“where are you from?”.

“It was about making everybody feel like we’re all together and all one we’re all on one journey, you know, in this case, it was a train journey, that being the metaphor,” he said.