On a recent Sunday afternoon, I joined a crowd in Queanbeyan for Rebus Theatre’s screening of their film, Re-Emergence: Every Storm Gives Way To A New Sunrise.

Made by the company in the south coast and around Queanbeyan, it was the result of the culmination of  more than three years of work with disabled actors in regional NSW, asking the question, “how do we emerge from bushfires, COVID19, drought and other disruptions over recent years?”

So, although superficially about re-emergence from covid, storms and the 2019-20 Black Summer, the film has the much deeper intention of showing how people with physical and intellectual disabilities can re-emerge from the most dangerous condition of all – a sense of isolation.

Queanbeyan River and The Hive arts centre on Crawford Street, used as the backdrop for a variety of exploration, have never looked so good as they do in this film.

Similarly, the hauntingly beautiful Tathra Headland is put to good effect as The Forest People, mysterious masked figures in hi-vis yellow raincoats, slip in and out of the trees on the shoreline. Their meaning is never fully articulated, but on one level there is the message that the people with disabilities often mask themselves —how to unmask is the problem .

Rebus Theatre’s Sammy Moynihan, the film’s director, has, with his team, devised a fictional narrative using film, theatre and movement workshops and discussion sessions where the participants articulated their dreams, their fears and their confession of weaknesses.

Sometimes in the film  they step out of  character to talk about acting and making the film.

All of them plainly saw their main task being to act, and to act well, but then again, acting itself has always been a way of getting the inner person out there for all to see, an important function of the Re-emergence project too.

The narrative is structured in 10 “chapters” around a fictional character, Abbey, played by Lucy Raffaele.

Abbey is at first thrilled to be part of the group’s Adventure Club, but increasingly sidelined when a combination of covid and her fellow club members’ urge to do something new forces a crisis and she finds herself alone, in the bush.

Among the wider group is Max (Dean Argaet) who has discovered he has an extraordinary aptitude for making coffee. When an impending storm forces the closure of the group’s favourite local coffee shop, Max decides to set up his own business, Coffee 2 the Max, which proves popular, leading him to believe that they’ve come for the coffee, not the companionship.

He’s wrong as the film shows and it is the need for connection and companionship that the rest of the film delineates.

There are many magical images in this film, like the derelict pianos arranged like a suite of sculptures in the bush, or the mysterious Forest People emerging from the trees.

As in many dramas, a cataclysmic storm intervenes during which all the truths come out, and the neglectful friends, by now sheltering in The Hive as the storm rages outside, realise that they have abandoned Abbey.

Towards the end, a kind of “wise woman,” Tanya, articulates a possible symbolic meaning for the story — the need to live in symphonic harmony and to hit “the right note.”

This gratuitous interpretation, to me, took away from the vitality brought to the narrative by the individual characters as they realise how mean and bullying their behaviour towards Abbey has been.

Not to worry, happily, the mysterious masked figures save the day, protecting Abbey from the storm and helping her first wear a mask and then unmask herself, so that she comes to realise she’s had a part to play in her own isolation.

Moynihan and his troupe of actors bring the film to a harmonious conclusion as the friends settle down for an art-making session that lays out in bright colours the triumphs, the highs and lows in their story.

Re-emergence will be released in an online streaming season from May 1-31. Tickets here