Strong is the New Pretty is about more than women kicking goals: ‘It speaks to a bigger movement’
Strong is the New Pretty traces the inspiring story of how the AFLW was created, but for its creative team, the new Australian play is about much more than women's sport.
Strong is the New Pretty. Photo: Sam Scoufus / Compadre.
For four months of the year, female footballers at the peak of their Aussie Rules-playing powers turn suburban ovals into stages, thrilling crowds with their skills – and with the simple fact that AFLW exists, even a decade into the Australian Football League’s professional national women’s competition.
‘She has this remarkable way of hooking you in with a story, hooking you in with the stuff that lures in an audience,’ says Sarah Giles, director of Strong is the New Pretty. ‘And then once you’re inside it, you find yourself being politically changed or activated by her work.’
Sarah Ward is a film and television critic; arts, entertainment and culture editor and journalist; and film festival organiser. She is the film and TV critic for ABC radio Gold Coast, the Australia-based film critic for Screen International, and a critic and member at the Alliance of Women Film Journalists. Sarah’s background also spans stints as film and television editor at both Concrete Playground and Variety Australia, and as Goethe-Institut Australien’s Kino in Oz critic and writer. Her work has been published by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Birth.Movies.Death, SBS, SBS Movies, Flicks, Lumina, Senses of Cinema, the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts, Junkee, FilmInk, Broadsheet, Televised Revolution, Metro Magazine and Screen Education, the City of Gold Coast, the World Film Locations book series and more.
