ABC's Jason di Rosso created video diaries of his father's final years, in a new feature showing at First Films 2024

When Jason Di Rosso heard his architect father was terminally ill and seeing a psychic healer, the shock was profound.

The devastating news was amplified by their physical distance, with Di Rosso living by railway tracks in inner-city Sydney, while his father was way out west in Perth. A movie critic of many decades and the host of Radio National's The Screen Show, Di Rosso turned to video diaries to process the trauma in the way he knows best, transforming them into luminous essay film The Hidden Spring.

Having played at the Melbourne International Film Festival and the Adelaide Film Festival, The Hidden Spring now comes home to Sydney via First Films 2024, a festival dedicated to daring debut works from emerging directors, curated by Paul Struthers and Jessica Ellicott.

Di Rosso's film is a bold act of generosity. "The weird thing is that I'm actually not the kind of person who's very open or giving of themselves," Di Rosso says. "I was never going to make a film that was incredibly warts and all, baring myself to the public."

And yet, paradoxically, the film is remarkably intimate, inviting viewers into his home, mid-kitchen renovation, and including footage of his daughter playing.

"When you end up making something like this, you're not really sure where the balance ends up falling," Di Rosso wryly chuckles. "You have to make audiences feel like they've gotten into your world and understood something about your sphere of existence, because otherwise it just wouldn't work. It would be too cold."

Planes, trains and all the feels

Little over 50 minutes long, The Hidden Spring is far from cold. A mesmeric movie, it offers thoughtful vignettes on Di Rosso's Italian and Croatian heritage, impermanence and the enduring love of sometimes-complicated family.

"I really like architecture historian Beatriz Colomina's idea that the house is a camera," he says.

Even dirty plates and orange peels take on a painterly quality in a handsome film that was shot, edited, written and produced by Di Rosso on a micro-budget. Passers-by and the labour of railway workers punctuate Di Rosso's narrated musings.

"Trains and train tracks are just so filmic," Di Rosso says. "There's this notion of liminal space, with people passing through at all hours to different parts of the city and country. There's also something about a track suggesting destiny. That we're all heading to the grave."

Following this train of thought, Di Rosso also takes to the skies, ferrying back and forth to Perth by plane over Ngadju land. His maternal grandfather chopped wood here for the construction of Kalgoorlie not long after arriving in Australia.

"I was editing the film throughout COVID when there was a lot of emphasis on the frontline workers, especially in hospitals, that were taking a bullet for all of us," he says.

"I thought about all the layers of medical expertise you become aware of when someone in your family is ill, and these people doing maintenance work on the railway line reminded me of all those hidden things."

Another immigrant story

The Hidden Spring's dreamy approach, mixing the real with the fantastical, was inspired by Italian director Pietro Marcello's haunting film, Lost and Beautiful. Di Rosso also drew on the more domestic concerns of late, great filmmaker Chantal Akerman.

"Her mother was a very big presence in almost all her films, including her final, No Home Movie, a very interior work about a parent dying in which architecture is so present," Di Rosso says. "It was important to me, as was Là-bas, or Down There, essentially a film looking out windows."

As a third-generation Italian-Australian, Di Rosso is amused by but a little wary of the immigrant nostalgia mainlined by folks like Sooshi Mango. He wanted his film to rewrite expectations about the diaspora.

"Everyone thinks they know the story of Italian-Australians as a wave of migration that comes here and has a whole heap of struggles and accomplishments," he says. "I wanted to ask, what happens after that?"

He suggests shades of grey. "They remain a little bit outsider but integrate in other ways that are often very surprising. With the effort you put into leaving home and setting yourself up in your new place, most migrants, in my experience, need to look forward."

Much like his father, whose architecture career was unexpected. "He wasn't from an academic background, and he struggled with that," Di Rosso says.

"He also had an unexpectedly spiritual life, so I wanted to bring a specificity back to that cohort that, in some ways, has been parked in the collective Australian memory as a thing that occurred and there's nothing more to say."

A family affair

Poetic, The Hidden Spring certainly has plenty to say, and Di Rosso is glad First Films gave him the chance to say it.

"It's wonderful that a festival like this supports emerging filmmakers, because they can afford to take risks with very modest resources and have that energy and excitement about them."

Di Rosso took a DIY approach, using an "amateur aesthetic" that aims to express the "raw emotions" he felt while making it.

He was a little concerned about people's reactions to the film, particularly his mum.

"She really likes it, and I was surprised by that," Di Rosso admits.

"I was a bit worried it might be inaccessible, which wasn't the film I wanted to make, but obviously it's unconventional.

He says a scene that gets most praise from the audience was one in which she spontaneously started to direct him and his dad while he was at their place in Perth.

"It's been a lesson for me, in filmmaking, that one of the shots people respond to most is hers, done completely on the fly, and it has pride of place in the film," he says.

"I think my father would have been proud of that."

The Hidden Spring is screening as part of First Films 2024. Explore the program here.