The fascinating George Gittoes, director of #WFA2015 Best Documentary Film and Socially Relevant Film “Love City, Jalalabad” and recent recipient of the prestigious Sydney Peace Prize, was profiled in this weekend’s THE AGE.
Artist George Gittoes at his 2014 exhibition, Vincent and the Snow Monkey, at Sydney’s Art Equity gallery. Photo: Dallas Kilponen
Gittoes honoured with Sydney Peace Prize
At dusk, a blue-tinged light envelops the mountain ridges outside Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan. The evenings here would be mostly quiet were it not for the occasional crackling of gunfire and the buzz of unmanned drones traversing the sky like huge mechanical bugs. “This is Taliban Central,” George Gittoes says, not without a certain relish, as we drive through a small village on the edge of town in a battered Toyota Corolla. The Australian artist and filmmaker brands himself an “edge walker” and compares his own courage to that of soldiers.
At a rickety roadside stall, three young men are slurping hot soup, surrounded by children playing in the dirt. Boys knock metal wheels around with sticks, whirling up spirals of dust, and girls with scarecrow-red hair and blue dresses eye us suspiciously. In a green field,
farmers discuss the coming cauliflower harvest.
Gittoes in the Jalalabad Yellow House with the boys he calls the Ghostbusters.
Photo: Andrew Quilty / Oculi
“I liken this to the Great Barrier Reef,” says Gittoes. “I could spend hours here just watching. Everything that passes by is just so beautiful. So exotic.”
It was from Jalalabad that a team of US Navy SEALs four years ago departed on a kill mission in two Black Hawk helicopters headed for Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. In the same year, 2011, Gittoes, who’d set up mobile art studios in conflict zones around the world for three decades, decided to make Afghanistan his new base.
With the help of his partner, Hellen Rose, a singer and actress from Sydney, Gittoes has started a film production company in a walled compound named the Yellow House, after the Sydney art collective he helped found in the 1970s. The house serves as a painting studio and movie workshop for local talents, street kids and outcasts who swarm the house at all hours of the day.
