Any information can be placed in the sidebar to help your website visitors navigate your site.The Documentary
A phenomenal amount of time has been spent exhaustively researching the legend of the Oakey Spitfires, with the view to creating an exciting documentary film. We have spent literally thousands of man hours combing through archives, defence and mining records, travelled to libraries, museums, newspapers, examined personal collections and spoke to and interviewed warbird enthusiasts, Australian Defence Force personnel and museum curators all over Australia and around the world to find out everything we possibly could about the legend of the buried Spitfires.
Over the next six months we hope to spend around a month shooting throughout Australia in an effort to complete principal filming. Of course, it all comes back to time and of course financing. The global economic crisis has had a major effect on the entire film production industry. Therefore the pool of money that is available to financing productions has shrunk considerably. But that’s not going to stop us. One way or the other we will find what we need and get the next phase of this project completed.
What’s driving this project?
Broken Wings is more than just finding the aircraft. In fact it works on a number of levels. Interwoven with the search itself is exploring the people and stories behind the myth, to capture some of the romance of the time and in particular the Spitfires. We will interview a range of people directly involved with the aircraft from those who worked at the base during the war, former Spitfire pilots and Oakey locals, to present day Spitfire owners, museum curators and former and serving Air Force personnel. Not only will we take our audience on a journey of discovery, but we’ll educate them along the way and provide them with a range of insights, stories and history of particular relevance and interest to the documentary.
Broken Wings is more than just finding the aircraft. In fact it works on a number of levels. Interwoven with the search itself is exploring the people and stories behind the myth, to capture some of the romance of the time and in particular the Spitfires. We will interview a range of people directly involved with the aircraft from those who worked at the base during the war, former Spitfire pilots and Oakey locals, to present day Spitfire owners, museum curators and former and serving Air Force personnel. Not only will we take our audience on a journey of discovery, but we’ll educate them along the way and provide them with a range of insights, stories and history of particular relevance and interest to the documentary.
We also want to find out, just what makes the Spitfire so special? There exists a passion for Spitfires that doesn’t exist with any other aircraft. The grace and rightness of the Spitfire make people love it still. In the public imagination, and no matter how doughty the role played by other aircraft, it was the Spitfire that ‘won’ the Battle of Britain. For those that are old enough to remember it first hand, it became a symbol of freedom, the aircraft that won the war. But to a much younger audience it’s simply a thing of sheer beauty from a bygone era. It’s shape, it’s design, it’s sound and the way it so gracefully cuts the air, fills the hearts and minds of people of all ages. The Spitfire has almost taken on a life of its own.And for this reason we feel our documentary will have incredibly broad appeal across a very wide audience, particularly if we discover even just one aircraft.
What makes Broken Wings so important?
How many times have we seen a documentary like this produced in Australia with a uniquely Australian story attached to it? Stories of good old fashioned adventure and a search for lost ‘treasure’. Not many. Is it that investors don’t share the same passion for this type of subject matter. Is Australia devoid of exciting stories worthy enough to be featured in a documentary? There just maybe some truth in the latter. Culturally, while Australia is arguably the oldest inhabited continent on
earth, European settlers didn’t truly begin to inhabit this country until the late 18th Century. So ‘modern’ settlement by comparison with other continents such as Africa, Europe and the America’s, is relatively young. This means that major archaeological finds are rare indeed. Spanish Galleons loaded with doubloons littering our coast are unheard of. Thousand year old temples concealed in unexplored, inaccessible jungles are non existent. And so too are ancient tombs containing the remains of kings and queens buried with untold riches for their journey to the afterlife. What’s more we were never invaded by marauding Vikings or Roman Legions, Hannibal or Genghis Khan, who had the courtesy to leave their calling cards behind. Therefore any archaeological expedition in this country deserves special attention, particularly where it directly relates to Australian history.Given the groundswell of public interest and support in our Anzac heritage over recent years, this documentary will have broad public appeal.
Consider the way the news media have picked up similar stories regarding wartime mysteries, such as the search for HMAS Sydney or the missing Japanese midget submarine recently found near Sydney. Similarly this documentary will incite a media frenzy both nationally and internationally and quite obviously the documentary will have a flow on effect from the interest it will undoubtedly generate .This is an adventure story that brings together what is known and what is not. We’ll weave together fact, fiction, legend, theory, supposition, hypothesis and analysis to bring together a documentary that takes people on a journey to discover whether the Spitfires do in fact exist. If they do, never before have brand new aircraft been recovered from anywhere in the world, and that alone makes this project that much more unique.