Latest news with #Dorrigo
News.com.au
23-05-2025
- News.com.au
The family of Pauline Fitzsimons who died driving through NSW floodwaters say police gave her the all clear
A family is calling for answers after their mother died after they said a police officer gave her the all clear to keep driving. Pauline Fitzsimons, 58, died driving through floodwaters at Dorrigo near Coffs Harbour on Wednesday night. Her family says the police officer gave Ms Fitzsimmons his mobile number to call if she got into any danger, then phoned him 20 minutes later in a 'hysterical state' because she was drowning. 'She told a family member a police officer told her he knew a safe way through to Coffs Harbour and was escorting her through,' son Tiernan Fitzsimons said in a statement to 9 News. 'He guided her into floodwaters and left her to her own devices. 'The idea that our mother was a reckless driver is a terrible lie.' On Thursday, NSW Police Assistant Commissioner David Waddel had told media Ms Fitzsimons had been travelling in her 4WD as part of a convoy when the police officer decided to head back. 'He checked the water levels for her, and she made a decision to continue,' he said. 'The water levels were only ankle deep.' On Friday night, a NSW Police statement said a full investigation around the circumstances surrounding Ms Fitzsimons' death would take place, including 'the officer's interactions with the woman prior and the weather conditions at the time'. The police officer involved is reported to be traumatised by the incident, Nine reported.
New York Times
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North' Is a Brutal but Poetic War Drama
Jacob Elordi stars in the brutalizing five-part Australian mini-series 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' available on Amazon Prime Video. The show is based on the novel by Richard Flanagan and combines a sweetly doomed romance, a layered domestic drama and a harrowing World War II tale. Elordi is terrific as Dorrigo, a young aspiring doctor heading off to war. Before he is deployed, he has a doting girlfriend, Ella (Olivia DeJonge), but he falls hard for his uncle's young wife, Amy (Odessa Young), and it's their taboo love that he visits in his mind during the darkest experiences of his life. Dorrigo is one of thousands of Commonwealth soldiers taken prisoner in the jungles of Thailand, where Japanese soldiers starve and torture them, work them to death, behead some, beat others for hours on end. We also see Dorrigo in the 1980s, now played by Ciaran Hinds; he's a successful surgeon and a comfortable philanderer. He is haunted and hollowed-out in some ways, of course, but he has a life, a practice, and now a book of a fellow prisoner's paintings is coming out, and he has been asked to speak about it. Each episode bounces around in time, and for once, split timelines come as a huge relief. The jungle scenes are agonizing, even by prestige-misery standards, and you, too, long to retreat, with Dorrigo, into sunny memory. Dorrigo is a poetry buff, and poems are woven into the whole show, as are painting and music, these expressions of humanity that surface during circumstances both mundane and depraved. A jolly woman plays tunes in bar; a skeletal soldier sings 'The Prisoner's Song' as he lies among his dysentery-stricken companions. The show depicts a dizzying variety of suffering, but it is also generous with its pity. There's a visceral quality to most scenes — the clammy humidity, the golden warmth of a sandy beach, the icy sterility of a gray office — as the show teases out the pains and pleasures of the body along with its grander ideas about the mind, the heart, the world, war. 'Narrow' is patient, but it isn't slow. It is also sometimes so illegibly dark that I resorted to turning on the audio descriptions.
The Guardian
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Narrow Road to the Deep North review – Jacob Elordi's fine turn in complex, confronting war drama
Many great directors have been attracted to war movies – or, as is the case with Australian auteur Justin Kurzel, a war-themed series, adapting Richard Flanagan's novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Film-makers of a certain calibre seem to view this genre as a rite of passage. Some productions – including the recent Apple TV+ series Masters of the Air – have a retrograde flavour, painting war (perhaps problematically) as a great big adventure. Many lean into spectacle, attempting to recreate the smoke and fury of battle, but in the process running the risk of celebrating or ennobling war. 'Every film about war,' declared François Truffaut, 'ends up being pro-war.' But The Narrow Road to the Deep North feels quite different from most war narratives, with a deeply layered central character and a heavy, morose tone of contemplation. There's very little battlefield action, the war elements mostly taking place in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, where many soldiers, including Australian medical student protagonist Dorrigo Evans (Jacob Elordi), are forced to work on the Burma railway. There's nothing remotely glamourous here. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning The story takes place in three time periods: pre, during and postwar. In the latter, Dorrigo is played by Ciarán Hinds. He has become a venerated, surly Sydney-based surgeon with a fierce glare and powerful turn of phrase. In one early scene he's questioned by a journalist about his description of the Japanese as 'monsters,' saying she's spoken to Japanese survivors who've lost everything, citing the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout, the show is deep-thinking, eschewing myopic patriotism. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Neither side is championed or vilified – although the show certainly doesn't turn a blind eye to the horrors committed by the Japanese in the camp, with several confronting and cinematically staged scenes, including one in which a prisoner is beheaded. The camp has both a tyrannical, horrifically violent colonel (Taki Abe) and a major (Shô Kasamatsu) who develops a fraught friendship with Dorrigo. There's an aching feeling that war pulls everybody in terrible directions. The way Kurzel depicts Dorrigo's relationships with women is also quite complex, not condemning him for the kinds of behaviour often viewed as moral mistakes. Before the protagonist is shipped off to war, while engaged to a woman (Olivia DeJonge) from a well-to-do family, he has a deep, intense sexual relationship with Amy (Odessa Young), the wife of his uncle Keith (Simon Baker). In the postwar timeline, he has an affair with Lynette (Essie Davis), the wife of his colleague Rick (Dan Wyllie). Elordi and Hinds' finely balanced performances, as the young and older Dorrigo, really feel like different reflections of the same person, strikingly distinct in some aspects but inseparable in essence. The three timelines are smoothly integrated – less a mosaic than a river current – swirling, overlapping, forming and unforming. Narrow Road has a stately aura, stiffer and more formal than most of Kurzel's work, with less of his signature tone – which is scuzzy and elegiac while somehow also elegant and poetic. You never doubt the show's realism, or the compassion underpinning it. This is less about the theatre of war than the psychological stain it leaves. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is streaming on Prime Video in Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada
The Guardian
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘We were all in it together': Jacob Elordi on his wartime epic The Narrow Road to the Deep North
To everyone except fans of the teen drama Euphoria, Jacob Elordi's star seemed to explode from nowhere two years ago. In 2023, Sofia Coppola's Priscilla and Emerald Fennell's Saltburn revealed to global audiences the breadth of the young Queenslander's range – a tormented and controlling Elvis in one vehicle, a charmingly selfish young British aristocrat in the other. They also certified him as a bona fide celebrity and sex symbol – the kind that can inspire lookalike contests. Australians might be forgiven for not knowing the 27-year-old actor is one of us: aside from a handful of small roles (including his feature film debut, aged 17 in Stephan Elliott's Swinging Safari – 'I think I said two words, probably 'shag me',' he says) – he's mostly played Americans and Brits. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Elordi's casting as Dorrigo Evans in the screen adaptation of Richard Flanagan's 2014 Booker prize-winning epic, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, out this month on Prime Video in Australia and later this year on the BBC in the UK, marks his first lead role playing an Australian. Partly inspired by the legendary Edward 'Weary' Dunlop and partly inspired by Flanagan's own father, Dorrigo is an Australian Army medical officer turned Japanese PoW on the Burma-Thailand railway, fighting to keep his comrades alive. He takes psychological refuge from the brutality of the jungle, back-breaking labour and his captors in memories of a unresolved love affair. Like Flanagan's novel, the five-part series takes place within three distinct timeframes: the prewar 'summer of love' Dorrigo shares with his uncle's much younger wife, Amy, played by Odessa Young (warning: graphic sex); the years as a PoW in the jungle (warning: graphic gore); and the 1980s, as an ageing, cynical and emotionally remote Dorrigo (played by Ciarán Hinds) takes stock of his life. The preparation for the PoW scenes was gruelling, requiring more than just emaciated bodies. The reality of forced hard labour coupled with starvation meant Narrow Road's PoW survivors had to be skin and sinew. The cast undertook a medically supervised six-week boot camp in rainforest south of Sydney to achieve the effect. Elordi says the on-screen camaraderie mirrors the close relationships the actors formed while shedding weight over that time. 'We were all in it together, so there was this great overwhelming amount of love in the whole process,' says the actor. 'It was incredibly challenging but deeply necessary, of course … because nobody wanted to phone that in or make a mockery of it.' Narrow Road marks an important first for director Justin Kurzel and screenwriter Shaun Grant – the collaborative duo have never worked on a television series before – but the sense of moral responsibility around retelling traumatic episodes of Australian history is familiar ground. Their 2011 film, Snowtown, told the true story of one of Australia's most grisly series of murders, while their 2021 film, Nitram, examined the events leading up to Tasmania's Port Arthur massacre. Added to this was the gravitas of Flanagan's book, the winner of seven major literary prizes including the Booker, and a work that earned the author the highest of praise, with the Economist dubbing Flanagan 'the finest Australian novelist of his generation' and the New York Review of Books counting him 'among the most versatile writers in the English language'. Like Flanagan, whose father was a Japanese PoW during the second world war, both director and screenwriter felt they had skin in the game. Kurzel's grandfather was one of the Rats of Tobruk, and Grant's grandfather was a survivor of the Burma-Thailand railroad. 'In a lot of ways, [he] was who I was writing it for,' says Grant. 'My grandfather was a very flawed man, and even though I loved him dearly, I may have looked at him and judged him in certain ways. 'When I first read Richard's book, it felt like I really got to know my grandfather for the first time, to feel what he must have gone through … because he never talked about any of that himself. 'The only time I remember him talking about that time was when I mentioned to him I'd watched The Bridge Over the River Kwai. 'We never whistled,' was all he said.' While Hinds' older Dorrigo carries the trauma of survivor's guilt, a disdain for sentimentality and an obsession with self-reliance, Elordi believes his young Dorrigo hints at many of the flaws that only reveal themselves later in the character's life. 'A lot of who he is was there before the war – there's this inherent stoic selfishness … and a lust for the immediacy,' Elordi says of Dorrigo, who embarks on an affair with Amy while engaged to his future wife, Ella (played as a young woman by Olivia DeJonge, and later by a wearily resigned Heather Mitchell). 'He's like a man on an odyssey his whole life – a singular hero's journey – and I think that is greatest flaw,' says Elordi. 'But strangely, in some ways, I also struggle to call it a flaw … it's what made him human, and what got him through the war.' Fellow Tasmanians Kurzel and Flanagan have enjoyed a close friendship for many years, which added a further layer of weighty responsibility to the project, the director says. Some characters in the series come across significantly more sympathetically than in the book: like Simon Baker's Uncle Keith, whose capacity to attract a beautiful young wife and keep her pulling beers behind the sticky counter of his country pub is more believable on screen; and Major Nakamura (Shô Kasamatsu), who seems almost as trapped in the jungle as the Australians he is guarding. This is simply part of the organic process of transforming literature into film, Kurzel says. 'As soon as you put anyone on screen, you find the good and bad in them,' he says. 'That's what's so special about cinema – you can see it on the actors' faces, you can feel another dimension to them.' There was no discussion with Flanagan about redressing one of the few criticisms levelled at the book: that its depiction of the Burma-Thailand railway construction largely ignored the fact that while about 2,800 Australian soldiers perished during its construction, almost 100,000 south-east Asian civilians also lost their lives under the same conditions. Kurzel disputes the criticism. 'There are really beautiful moments and observations in the book from the [Australian] soldiers recognising that other slave labour was happening at the time. And Richard [also] included the point of view of the Japanese soldiers after the war, [and the impact] of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 'But in terms of making a TV series, it is a piece of cinema. There is something so singular about Dorrigo. It is a story told from his point of view and that's the way it played out – we wanted everything to be seen through the prism of Dorrigo.' The Narrow Road to the Deep North will premiere on Prime Video in Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada on 18 April
Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Jacob Elordi plays a WWII prisoner in The Narrow Road to the Deep North trailer
Jacob Elordi plays a soldier held captive as a prisoner of war in the trailer for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, an upcoming Australian drama series on Prime Video. Dorrigo Evans (Priscilla's Elordi) is an Australian doctor who became a Far East prisoner of war during the construction of the Burma Railway in World War II. Told over multiple periods, Dorrigo once embarked on a passionate love affair with his uncle's wife, Amy Mulvaney (Odessa Young), that changed his life. In the present, an older Dorrigo (Ciarán Hinds) reflects on his life as a war hero with much sadness and grief. 'We all left a part of ourselves in that jungle,' Hinds' Dorrigo says in the trailer. 'Memory is the only true justice.' The Narrow Road to the Deep North's ensemble includes Olivia DeJonge, Heather Mitchell, Thomas Weatherall, Show Kasamatsu, and Simon Baker. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is based on Richard Flanagan's 2013 novel of the same name. Shaun Grant wrote the show for television, and Justin Kurzel directed the series. Grant and Kurzel have previously collaborated on 2011's Snowtown, 2020's True History of the Kelly Gang, and 2021's Nitram. Kurzel directed 2024's The Order, a thriller about an FBI agent's mission to stop a white supremacist group from overthrowing the government. In his review, Digital Trends' Alex Welch wrote, 'The Order is a gripping, haunting, and unfortunately necessary true-crime thriller.' The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a five-part series that will debut on April 18 on Prime Video in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The BBC will air the show in the U.K. Sony is still looking for a distribution deal in the U.S.
