Critics have hailed it “a bonafide ripper of a documentary, from start to finish”, “formidable, feisty and fun”, and “remarkable and unintentionally radicle”. Isla’s Way is the story of an extraordinary 87- year- old bush mechanic, Isla Roberts, living an ordinary Australian life.
Released at the South Australian Film Festival in October, the story of the straight-shooting Great Grandma is directed by Marion Pilowsky, who tracks Isla for an eventful and cathartic year, including a trip back to her original marital home, a remote sheep station at Bascombe Wells on the Eyre Peninsula.
Isla’s lived experience of rural Australia, raising a family in severe economic hardship, and finally coming out later in life, all make for a poignant documentary of a woman who’s well ahead of her time and refuses to be put in a box.
‘Isla now lives with her partner Susan in a simple cottage in the Adelaide Hills, with two ponies and a dog. Her inadvertently political life as a Queer octogenarian is a fresh examination and subversion of the LGBTQIA+ experience,” said Pilowsky.
