It is a performances centric movie

A very feeble attempt at affirmatie action

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

This film is set on the beautiful Hawkesbury River near Sydney in Australia. It is about a young city bred man who takes a job at an Oyster Farm so he can be close to his sister who is in rehab. in a local private hospital after an awful car accident. He goes to work for a man who runs a family inherited oyster farm with his crazy Irish father. The son is estranged from his independent wife who is believed to be an "oyster whisperer" by her crazy father-in-law. The young man falls in love with a local girl who is full of secrets and surprises. Her father is the man who cleans the septic tanks ensuring that the river is clean, but he falls under suspicion when he buys a brand new motor for his runabout boat. He makes friend with a group of local ex Vietman vetran soldiers who drink beer and play poker up the river from the local village. I enjoyed this film a lot.

A debut film from an AFTRS student. A typical, empty, superficial piece of work that displays no effort at trying to get inside the minds of these characters, indeed, it rather pretends to know and is so convinced that these are 'good blokes and Sheila's' it doesn't even bother to try any harder. The story lumbered from point to point with holes in between the size of the Hawkesbury River, and the acting does no more than try and cover over these. In the end, none of it comes together in any sensible way, and there is no attempt to show what the hell this whole mess of a film is about anyway. Is it about oyster farming, or is it about life of a Sydney sider living in the country?Or is it neither? A confusion. (Spoiler) It ends with the main male and female characters in a bath together, having somehow successfully fallen in love, with no attempt on the part of the filmmaker to convincingly portray the two falling in love. It's almost as if we are expected to believe this relationship based on the mythology or formula seen in other films, a concession that this is poorly written but telling us at the same time we should go along with it for the sake of pleasing the ego of some filmmaker far far away with nothing to say and all the power to say nothing. Another film from our abysmal industry, and why? Just ask where the filmmakers learned their craft.

I hope Anna Reevs, the director as well as the writer, takes justified pride in this amazingly wonderful first effort. Because of its class I was surprised to see that it was her debut film-how many others would dream of writing and directing such a superb first effort.I saw this film several days ago in Fremantle and although I had heard from electronic media outlets that it was a very good film, I had no idea, other than the obvious title what I was going to see. The beauty of the Hawksbury was breathtaking and the juxtaposition of that beauty with the basic everyday existence of the oyster farmers presented a compelling contradiction throughout the film.Maybe it's the technical strides that have taken place during the recent past but I am swallowed by the beauty of the cinematography; I am sure Bollinger whose camera work captured every nuance of the natural beauty of this region would tell me that it was his and Reeves' direction that captured the setting and that it had nothing to do with improvements in equipment. Be that as it may, the camera images were beautiful.The actors were on the whole unknown to me but the work they did made a life unknown to me real and more importantly, eminently worth watching. An absolute gem of a movie not to be missed.

"Oyster Farmer" is a warm, refreshing, Australian take on the old-fashioned genre of the secretive, hunky stranger with a murky past shaking up a small community.Alex O'Lachlan in his notable debut as "Jack Flange" is very much like William Holden in "Picnic" and Paul Newman in "The Long Hot Summer." While debut writer/director Anna Reeves certainly appreciates his visual and visceral assets, his character's mysteriously tattooed masculinity is a Sensitive New Age Guy metrosexual compared to the hard-working blokes along the mangroves of the isolated Hawkesbury River north of Sydney, which looks a lot like the bayou country of Louisiana that has been similarly used for sultry effect in movies like "The Big Easy." While it's a bit confusing at first to sort out the relationships (let alone the basics of oyster farming), partly due to the accents, in this tight and quirky Brooklyn where everyone knows generations of everybody's paternity, marital disputes, personal business, and, particularly for the plot, their mail, the gradual revelations add to our enjoyment of the comfortable repartee as we are thrust into the ongoing squabbles along with the outsider and learn to appreciate this fading lifestyle as it becomes his home despite his suspicions and other plans.Jim Norton as a Granddad with an Irish gift of gab is particularly entertaining as he goads his stubborn wirey son, an appealing David Field, to make up with his wife, who has the more successful touch as an oyster farmer.Women in this macho environment have to not only be tough, but resilient as they find ways to still assert their femininity. Diana Glenn's "Pearl" seems perfectly adapted to the local way of life-- her hitchhiking up the river is a wonderful detail even as she has "Sex and the City" proclivities --though her flirtation with "Jack" is only frankly lusty. Kerry Armstrong is a marvelous matriarch, but her character's level-headedness reduces opportunities for jealousy, as the script opts for humor over tension.Jack Thompson has a small local color role, but key as he becomes an anchoring father figure for the restless "Jack" as we see him grow new roots.The national park scenery and Alun Bollinger's cinematography are breathtakingly beautiful and that waterfront train looks like a delightful ride, though a bit more geographical context would have been helpful.