True South, a new documentary following the 2022 Sydney to Hobart race and its winners, is an inspiring and exciting work that is sure to resonate with Australian audiences. The film is centred around the Winning and Dean families, two sailing families that manned the winning boat Andoo Comanche in the 2022 race, and depicts their complex relationship with sailing in the leadup to the race.
John and Herman Winning, father and son, have a difficult relationship and can only truly communicate with each other through their shared love of sailing, deciding to partake in the Sydney to Hobart together as a way to bond before John becomes too elderly to participate. They purchase the 100-foot yacht Comanche and start preparing for the race with a crew that includes Herman’s lifelong friends Nathan and Peter Dean, brothers whose father died sailing in the infamous 1998 Sydney to Hobart race. What sailing represents for these men—be it a means of communication or a means of remembrance for a dead loved one—becomes the emotional basis of a documentary that profoundly studies grief, connection and endurance.
Director Dave Klaiber, in his feature directorial debut, largely subverts the typical emotional expectations of a male sports film/documentary. Instead of following subjects whose patriarchal inability to comfortably express their emotions leaves them as developmentally stunted hollow people, the sons of the Winning and Dean families are deep and emotional subjects whose emotional instability comes not from cutting themselves off from their feelings, but from a lack of reciprocation and response from the people they are expressing their emotions to. Ironically, the sudden death of Nathan and Peter’s father leaves them without a person to express their unresolved feelings about the death to, and John’s stereotypical stoic masculine persona leaves Herman feeling worthless and unwanted. Their emotional instability makes the Comanche and the Sydney to Hobart transcend a race, allowing it to become a healing journey for the two families, a transformation that is incredibly uplifting.
On a formal and technical level, True South is excellent, and Klaiber shows promise as a documentarian. While the formal devices in play during the talking heads aspect of the documentary are quite simplistic, bordering on cliché, the cinematography and editing in the sailing sequences are invigorating and beautiful, and the film’s overall pacing is incredibly well-crafted.
Overall, True South is a surprisingly poignant and emotional documentary that offers profound insight into grief, connection, and familial relationships, and will surely be a heartwarming experience for any viewer.