Wide Open Sky

Synopsis:  Every year for the past ten years Sydney-based conductor and teacher Michelle Leonard has toured the tiny towns of outback New South Wales to audition children aged 8 to 18 for one of the 130 places in the Moorambilla Voices choir which annually opens the Moorambilla Music Festival in Coonamble – about six and a half hours out of Sydney – where Michelle grew up. The successful children travel far from home to spend three days at ‘concert camp’ where they learn the demanding repertoire. A month later they return for the performance.

For the first few minutes of this inspirational documentary, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s not going to be much more than an extended episode of the ABC-TV series Australian Story – lots of shots of Michelle being driven through the stark and isolated countryside and under, as the title suggests, plenty of wide open sky to small, struggling communities. But as soon as she gets out of the car and starts interacting with the children, the film comes alive and it wasn’t too long before I was hooked.

In a way, the whole idea of the auditions, the choir and the concert is a bit of a pretext. Yes, the competition for places and the way the kids deal with the performance pressure is gripping and nerve-wracking, but what the film is really about is the power of the experience and how it unlocks the creative potential of these young people who might otherwise never have recognised their musical abilities. It’s a great premise. But of course, it’s not enough just to have a great premise. A doco like this lives or dies according to the personalities of its subjects – those who deliver the story to us. Having Michelle at the centre of the film would have been a dead-cert for the filmmakers; she’s a funny, gregarious and highly skilled musician and teacher and her passion for what she does is infectious, not just on screen but with the kids as well. The uncertainty would have been in finding a group of kids who we could follow and identify with. As we get to know the half dozen kids who will be our touchstones throughout the process, any shred of uncertainty quickly vanishes. They are astonishing.

Opal comes from Grawin, a small opal mining town where she sits in the bush and composes her own songs; Taylah comes from an indigenous community in Brewarrina where she dreams of being a country singer and busks outside the local butcher’s shop; Katelyn and Ella are best friends from Cobar and can’t believe that they’ve both got in; Kyhnan comes from Lightning Ridge where he’s just as committed to his footy as he is to singing. But the gem of the group is Mack whose desire to perform is almost bursting out of his skin even though he admits that he sometimes hides his true self from his friends in order to fit in. These six and the rest of this unique choir all find each other in the music and discover that, far from being alone in the world, there are lots of other kids just like them.

In addition to the kids we meet a host of unforgettable characters. There’s Dot, the rough-as-bags Camp Manager who starts out like a boot camp Sergeant and ends up a sweetie looking after bed-wetters and singing the kids naughty songs around the campfire. Then there’s Nea who imparts pearls of wisdom as she ices a most impressive array of cakes and Alice the young talented composer whose song the choir will sing.

Wide Open Sky is a deceptively powerful documentary that speaks to the need for a creative outlet and the potency of music as a universal language. It is beautifully shot by Carolyn Constantine who somehow gets way more coverage than seems reasonable for the two cameras credited. Of course, the story reaches the conclusion that we expect it to, but perhaps the most amazing thing about this film is that while we sit through the credits and absorb the many moving and insightful things it  has had to say (possibly with a tear or two) we see footage of Michelle a year later rolling up to the same schools, ready to do it all over again. It’s emotionally exhausting just to think about it.

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