OPENING SHOT is back with new docos made by Aussie’s next generation filmmakers. First up, GROWING UP GAYBY follows director Maya Newell, herself raised by two mums, as she explores the impact of gay parenting.
Series starts next Wednesday night (Wed 20/11) on ABC2 at 9.30pm

A touching, worldly and uplifting film about childhood, parenting and acceptance finds its source in an unexpected place.

In the half-hour, first-person documentary Growing Up Gayby, 25-year-old filmmaker Maya Newell reflects on a sweet, bucolic and loving childhood raised by two gay mothers.

Tired of the predictable and odd questions that strangers frequently ask her (”Do you wish you had a father?” ”Are you gay?”), Newell sets out to question the assumptions and prejudices of those who oppose marriage equality and the very notion of gay couples raising children.

In doing so, her film goes straight to the heart of what makes modern families tick and thrive. If 12-year-old Ebony from Sydney’s western suburbs doesn’t bowl you over with her resilience and smarts, it may be time to check your pulse.

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Growing Up Gayby isn’t a missive from the barricades of the gender or marriage-equality wars. Most notable is its measured and quiet tone, even when Newell approaches her family’s would-be nemesis, Fred Nile, the anti-gay, conservative, Christian NSW parliamentarian.

”As a child who grew up in a same-sex family, I’m so used to seeing the rhetoric that’s gone on for the past five years, people with different views yelling across tables at each other,” says Newell. ”I think Australia and the whole world in general is pretty sick of that model of approaching this issue. For me, watching people yell across tables is frustrating, because everyone seems to think they know what’s best for kids like me.

”But no one is asking the kids or is privy to the beautiful moments around the dinner table or having a fight in the car on the way to your school holiday – all those moments that are part of being a family.

”That’s what family means to me and I wanted to show that to the rest of the world.”

Her approach may be counter-intuitive, but as we witness in Newell’s frank yet disarming encounters with Nile and newspaper columnist Janet Albrechtsen, it yields rich rewards.
”I think it’s an approach that not many people that want to win a debate would go about, but that’s what we wanted to do with this film,” she says.

These meetings are not just opportunities for Nile and Albrechtsen to explain to Newell – and importantly, the audience – the reasons for their views, but for Newell to put pointed questions to them.

While Newell doesn’t expect to alter anyone’s convictions about gays raising children, she notes that when she showed Albrechtsen the film, she ”got to the end and had a tear in her eye”.

”That doesn’t mean she’s changing [her position] or anything, but possibly she was shown another side of things that maybe she hadn’t thought of before.”

Growing Up Gayby is one of five short films by emerging filmmakers screening under the Opening Shot banner on ABC2.

Co-funded with Screen Australia, the season of short films is a window to ”subjects that matter to young people, told by young people, for young people”, according to ABC2 controller Stuart Menzies.

Other episodes will also cover sexual abuse, suicide and the popularity of cosmetic vaginal treatments.

Given that same-sex couples have been raising children long before the prospect of a marriage-equality bill loomed on the horizon, it has ”a lot of ramifications other than just being allowed”, says Newell. ”There’s feeling accepted and having your friends and family, kids at your local school and politicians giving off positive rhetoric about your family.

”As a kid there’s a big difference in that.

”Marriage is a milestone in a life and saying [gay people] can’t have that is important.

”I would always fight for equality for everyone.”

Growing Up Gayby focuses on children raised by mothers. Children raised by gay fathers aren’t represented, as there are so few in Australia, says Newell – less than a handful born through surrogacy who are now in the 11 to 13 age group.

”If I got to make this film in five years, it would have gay dads in it,” Newell notes.

”I think a good point for all of these kids is if you acknowledge, ‘I’m different and my family is different from your family’, you have a far greater understanding of difference in general for everyone,” Newell says.

Series starts next Wednesday night (Wed 20/11) on ABC2 at 9.30pm

Author: Paul Kalina
Publication: The Sydney Morning Herald
Date: 14 November 2013
Video Clip: ABC
See the origianal article here