Unfolding Florence: The Many Lives of Florence Broadhurst

This is a unique documentary that gives a detailed insight into the life of an extremely colourful and gutsy Australian design innovator and artist, Florence Broadhurst. She was found murdered in her wallpaper design studio in 1977, a crime which is still unsolved. This film explores Florence’s life, leading up to this tragic event. Using a mixture of visually stunning real interviews, stylised drama re-enactments, wonderful computer graphics, Monty Python-style animation, incredible archival footage and interviews, this is a truly vibrant and intriguing film. As Florence eventually gained her local fame by designing wallpaper, this film makes use of this fact, and every shot has the same vivid, multi-coloured and flamboyant feel as her designs. It took me a while to work out whether this movie was fiction or fact (despite the fact it was label as a documentary), as the opening voiceover was that of someone who was apparently dead. But once I got my head around what I was actually watching, I slowly got hooked. Although Florence’s life was very interesting – she was such a powerful and determined women – it was the overall look of the film that I respected the most. The mixture of so many different styles and mediums was amazing. I really loved some of the animations in the film as they really made me laugh. Overall, it was a relatively slow paced film, that was a little hard to follow at first, but as the time paced and the story progressed, it developed into a stunning work of art. For a film based around wallpaper, I guess it was fairly exciting in contrast!