1 x 26 minute documentary
Completed in 2002

Executive Producers: Firelight Productions
Writer / Director: Sascha Ettinger Epstein
Producer: Renata Schuman
Cinematography: Mark Bliss & Justin Malinowski
Editing: Roland Gallois & Andrew Aristedes
Music & Sound: Scott Collins

Financed with the Assistance of: FTO, AFC and SBS

Synopsis

At night the cracked, dimly-lit pavements of Kings Cross swarm with the deviants of an unknowable underworld. In the thick of this chaos is a photographer who has seen and immortalised it all. For over ten years, Peter Darren Moyle has been trawling the depths of Sydney’s underbelly with his old 1936 medium-format camera, illuminating the darkest shadows of the city’s psyche. This is a film about his unprecedented photographic odyssey through the blackness and his recent struggle to emerge into the light.

Since arriving penniless in the big smoke in the late 1980’s, he has carried his camera to the frontline of the inner-city badlands, traversing terrain that no other photographer could dare to tread. The tireless intensity of his work has meant eating out of bins so as to afford film, sleeping rough alongside derelicts and setting up darkrooms in squats and abandoned warehouses. The result is a reservoir of mind-blowing black and white imagery documenting a social history largely absent from the wider collective consciousness.

Not merely a correspondent from the edge, Peter Darren Moyle has had to fight for survival on the street. At times he has come perilously close to losing himself in vice. But his era of darkness is coming to a close. He wants out of the gutter, and for the message of his vision to be communicated to a wider audience. With an exhibition of his work being curated by his mentor the renowned photographer and critic Robert McFarlane, this aspiration may well be possible.

Using interviews and observational footage filmed in dramatic locations in the inner-city, this documentary builds an uncompromising portrait of Peter Darren Moyle. It integrates his remarkable life story with his photographic work whilst simultaneously capturing the essence of the urban wilderness so integral to his existence. Most importantly it follows his ascent as he strives towards his first solo exhibition.