The Large Blue

15.34 min / 2024

DAMIEN HARRISON - Mark Kennedy / Mark Stone

 SASHA LEONG – Megan

 ELISA ARMSTRONG - Jill

 JENNA NATION - Interviewer

MATT QUATTRO - Camera operator 1                           

CHARLY VAN REST SILENT M STUDIO - Sound design

DAMIEN HARRISON/ SASHA LEONG - Script edits   
                       
THE VISION HOUSE MELBOURNE - Equipment    

footage:
Oximitten
Oxfam Aotearoa
Alex Rusdy
Firefighter Hayden
Victorian Emergence Responses
BBC Earth

A two-image film based on the book Undercover: ‘The True Story of Britain's Secret Police’ and witness statements from victims. The narrative revolves around the audition of a cop becoming an undercover agent and incorporating a new identity. He is trained to lie and act as a sympathetic and trustworthy person. The video is set in Melbourne and therefore only speculative, based on rumors. It is edited as a shattered timeline, with parallel realities.

Starting as a small group in the 1960s, a time of violent student riots, the British undercover police unit steadily grew in the decades that followed. Its main task being to infiltrate activist circles. Romantic relationships were seen as necessary and condoned by these men’s superiors.

The film draws a parallel with mimicry, a trait of parasites, such as the caterpillar of The Large Blue butterfly, that, to get enough food, mimics the pheromones of ants. Once taken into the nest it can eat all the larvae undisturbed, slowly but surely depleting the colony of its future.