It’s a tiny, unassuming little film, but in a lot of ways Pawno (Paul Ireland, 2015) feels like the culmination of myriad socio-economic strands visible in Australian cinema since 1992. A low-budget project funded partly by backers on Pozible, the story is a tapestry of different narratives all set in Melbourne’s hipster hotspot of Footscray. Taking place over a single day, the twelve characters all orbit Les’ (John Brumpton) pawnshop, conducting business there, working nearby or simply loitering on the street. Some of them have big dreams, while others have big secrets, but the common ground for all of them is that their fates run through the pawnshop that day: buying, selling, bartering, begging.
The recession that gripped the suburb in 1992 has gone, but so has the working class,…
