SHORT FILM PREMIERE: Stefan Hunt & Vanessa Marian - 'Yeah The Boys'

“Yeah the boys!” is a common phrase you’ve probably heard chanted routinely by groups of enthusiastic, young men in Australia, whether shouted on someone’s Instagram story, hurled at the screen airing the footy at the pub, or just as a passing nod to a fellow male companion who has done something worth celebrating.

It’s a symbol of contemporary brotherhood and camaraderie, a loud and proud proclamation of kinship that can’t be replicated through relationships and connections outside of male friendship.

For husband-and-wife-director-choreographer duo Stefan Hunt and Vanessa Marian, the phrase Yeah The Boys is the title for their collaborative short film that creates a discourse around Australian masculinity through choreography and screen storytelling.

The 8-minute short explores the masculine identity, Australian larrikinism and our country’s relationship with drinking culture, offering a cheeky, tender, and confronting observation of how men communicate their woes through any means other than language. Choreographer Vanessa Marian recalls gaining inspiration for the film’s contents from a friend who was writing about feminism and Australian masculinity.

“My friend, Oni Blecher, was writing on Australian masculinity through the feminist lens and I thought it would be a cool prompt for a dance development,” she told The Music.

“Myself, Oni, and two assistant choreographers, Alice Robinson and Natasha Sturgis just strolled into a dance studio armed with a slab of VBs, a pack of durries, and a playlist of Aussie pub rock songs for our six wonderful dancers to respond to. I didn’t go in with any expectations, but the movement phrases that began to take shape that day kind of took my breath away, and I felt compelled to build on it and make it a film. So that’s how I brought my hubby, Stefan, on board both as the director, and our head cultural advisor.”

The film is mostly without dialogue, with the only comprehensible words spoken within it coming from the sole female character at the beginning, who is seen cleaning up her partner’s face before he heads to a backyard gathering with his mates.

The fusion of dance, music and visuals provides most of the dialogue from there, an intentional move from Marian and Hunt to express a key component of male-to-male communication.

“We originally had more dialogue planned for the film, but I found we could say so much through gesture and body language,” Marian said.

“It made so much sense because many cishet men don’t use words to communicate, so this became a fun way to explore how you can say everything without uttering a single word,”

“Dance is so impressive in person, but the energy can easily get lost on screen. So the camera essentially became the seventh dancer, complete with its own tightly choreographed movement pathway as it would spin, duck and weave through the chaos of a messy night,” Hunt said.

“But even with such dynamic visuals, it was the incredible score that really elevated the energy and brought the story to life.”

The film’s score is spearheaded by Melbourne electronic music duo The Avalanches, who through a combination of fast-paced keys, breaks and hard-hitting synths, have soundtracked the belligerence of the film’s main setting: a backyard piss-up. The score dips from chaos and disarray to the menacing stillness of a night coming to an end, marking a significant, visceral tie between the auditory and visual elements.

“We wanted an Aussie who could bring those sonic cultural references, and The Avalanches were obviously at the top of the dream collaborator list,” Marian said.

“So I had assumed this meant we would find an amazing composer and give them The Avalanches as a reference, but Stef thinks bigger than that, which is why I love working with him. His motto is always ‘if you don’t ask, the answer is always no,’ so we went on a big quest to find someone, who maybe knew someone, who maybe knew someone connected to them,”

“Robbie Chater was so wonderfully collaborative and invested in the project,” Hunt said.

“I think the score went through 27 rounds as we crafted it to the specific BPM of the choreography while considering how it emotionally coasts, crescendos, swells, and dips in all the right places,” 

“And he brought The Avalanches’ magic to the project with the sampling too. It was incredible to hear how he’d seamlessly thread a kookaburra laugh, or the ABC Rage theme in exactly the right emotional moment.”

While Marian and Hunt don’t imagine an 8-minute short film to completely flip society’s standpoints on Australian masculinity on their head, they do hope the film sparks a necessary conversation around larrikinism, bloke culture, masculine identities and drinking culture, and who in our society gets left out, neglected or discriminated against at the hands of these notions. While Yeah The Boys is riddled with a sort of realness and rawness that can leave audiences either inspired or challenged, at the core of it, the duo hope the film allows people from all walks of life to feel seen.

“If I were to dial it down to a conversation starter, then perhaps I’d speak to this idea of larrikinism. It’s such a big part of Aussie culture, and it’s a particularly celebrated trait in men, but we’ve found that, depending on your lived experience in this country, it can bring up a whole lot of different feelings for people,” Marian said.

“So when we started to ideate for this project, we had this one question in mind: when does larrikinism stop feeling fun?”

“We’ve had such varied responses to the boys’ behaviour in the film and we love that to be honest. We’ve noticed a lot of women, queer folk, and people of colour describing the film as tense, scary, and infuriating. I think our favourite description was ‘beautifully horrible’,” Hunt said.

“A lot of Aussie blokes who deeply identify with the film’s portrayal of blokeism described it as nostalgic, relatable, and fun right up until that one pivotal turning point where the tension boils over into a fight. That’s not to say it didn’t provoke any critical thinking with these guys. Many spoke to the power of watching such a familiar scene through a sober lens, perhaps for the first time in their lives,”

“Overall it’s been wonderful meeting Aussies from so many walks of life and hearing how and why this film resonates with them. That’s probably our favourite part of this whole journey.”

Yeah The Boys had its world premiere earlier this year at Flickerfest where it won Best Australian Short. It was also nominated for Best Cinematography and the Innovation Award at the St Kilda Film Festival, winning the latter, and was recently nominated for Best Special Visual Project at the 2024 UK Music Video Awards.

In a The Music exclusive, you can watch an early bird premiere of the short film Yeah The Boys below, directed by Stefan Hunt and choreographed by Vanessa Marian.