A live film commissioned by Abbotsford Convent, five days of intensive devising culminating in a real-time cinematic broadcast woven through one of Melbourne's most atmospheric heritage precincts.
Magdalen was born from an unusual brief: not to film at the Convent, but to film with it. The 5-day workshop process brought together performers, camera operators, and technicians to develop work in direct response to the Convent's layered history, its architecture, its silences, its shadows. The result was not a documentary but a live narrative: scripted, rehearsed, then performed live in a single unbroken transmission.
The scale of the Abbotsford Convent, its sprawling grounds, multiple buildings, and distinct interior atmospheres, demanded a technical solution capable of moving fluidly between spaces without the constraints of cable infrastructure. Bonded cellular transmission enabled seamless, broadcast-quality signal across the entire precinct, allowing camera operators to move freely while the director switched live from a central control hub.
“The Convent is a place saturated with presence. The work of live cinema was to find the frequency of that presence and transmit it, unmediated, unedited, in real-time.”
Michael Beets, Director
The workshop methodology was as much about listening as it was about directing. Performers were not cast into roles but developed characters through daily devising sessions in response to specific locations within the precinct, the laundry, the chapel, the garden. The camera operators functioned as dramaturgical collaborators, shaping what the audience would see not through post-production but through the live act of framing.
On broadcast night, audience members entered the Convent's main hall to watch the live-edited feed projected in real-time, knowing that somewhere in the buildings around them, the film was being made. The sensation was of cinema becoming permeable, the world of the story pressing against the world of the audience.
