“CITYNEWS” bumped into award-winning filmmaker Sotiris Dounoukos in Petrie Plaza at lunchtime where he was busy shooting a scene for “Joe Cinque’s Consolation”.

The film is based on Helen Garner’s account of the death in suburban Dickson of Cinque at the hands of his law student girlfriend Anu Singh.

In the film, as in real-life, Singh announces her plans at a dinner party attended by uni friends.

“We’re three weeks into filming,” Dounoukos told us, “I’ve got lots to tell you.”

We can’t wait.

UPDATE:

Dounoukos’ film “A Single Body” (Un Seul Corps) won the Toronto International Film Festival’s inaugural Short Cuts International global showcase of short films last year.

“Joe Cinque’s Consolation” will be shot around Canberra. Told from different viewpoints, it considers the involvement of the people surrounding the events in 1997, including Singh’s friends who were at the house the night she killed Cinque by lacing his coffee with Rohypnol, then injecting him with heroin.

“The theme is how a community reacts… Canberra is on show… Canberra is ‘a bubble,’ both connected and disconnected,” Dounoukos told “CityNews” earlier this year.

“One of the most important things is the organisation of the facts,” he said, “Helen Garner allowed us to see her source materials and that was important, because not a lot is on the public record, but mine is no courtroom drama.”

His film, he said, would trace the story chronologically, of events leading up to the death of Joe Cinque and look at the “boy meets girl” story of Cinque and Singh and their community of friends and students, also tracing her plan to kill him.

One of the difficulty elements in the plot, Dounoukos told us, was that reputedly, Cinque was about to leave Singh. “What does it suggest about events and their relationship to the truth? We’ve embraced the ambiguity of whether he was going to leave her or not in a rich telling of this story.”