By Chloe Lizotte In his first feature, The Plains, David Easteal nestles his camera into the backseat of a Hyundai sedan belonging to Andrew (Andrew Rakowski), a lawyer in his late fifties. As he commutes home from a sleepy office park on the outskirts of Melbourne, he whizzes by suburban strip malls and inches through traffic jams, then merges onto the freeway alongside…

By Chloe Lizotte It’s not immediately clear who the protagonist of James Vaughan’s debut feature is. Following the credits, which play over a montage of 18th-century artist William Bradley’s watercolours of English ships docking in Sydney (the settlement’s first representation in Western art), we are shown a sunny park on the edge of Sydney’s harbour,…