Grandma’s house is a 20-minute observational-documentary short film about my grandparents, Colin and Gay Cahill, who bought a house on Coledale Avenue for $10,000 in 1971 and, after 50 years of raising their children and grandchildren in the area, decided to sell in 2018.
Growing up in Coledale, I was surrounded by my entire family – siblings, parents, cousins, aunties, uncles, grandparents and locals – and my grandparents’ house was always within walking distance. But, after 18 years of taking my grandma’s house in Coledale for granted, my grandparents sold.
I was studying at AFTRS, a film school in Sydney, at the time, so I got out a camcorder and started filming the emotional final month of them in their house. I knew it was too special not to film, and filmmaking and writing has always been a way for me to hold onto memories. What I’ve captured is a mockumentary-style home video of sorts. A capsule of a time gone by. But, also, my grandma’s story. One that I hadn’t heard before. Or maybe, I just hadn’t listened to.
Grandma is now in her 70s and loves walking the beach, where she beachcombs for shells and collects the rubbish daily. She makes shell art, which you can check out at Coledale Shell Art’s Facebook page. She is thoughtful, family-oriented, and she has been like a second mother to all of us grandkids growing up in Coledale, frequently babysitting and housekeeping for us.
I’ve chosen to give Grandma the narrative voice, to lead the story as the matriarch of the house, and to get an insight into her life in Coledale over the years and why she decided to sell.
The film touches on how much the town has changed over the past few years as the migration of people out of cities reached an unprecedented demand, with house prices spiking, the pressure of gender roles in the household that Grandma was struggling to maintain as she got older, the need to downsize, and the impact of gentrification on the elderly. It’s a change to the lifestyle that they know and are comfortable with. Grandma loved walking “up the shop” to the newsagent to buy the paper, getting to Thirroul without any traffic, and just the slower lifestyle that the towns used to have before they were as “discovered”.
As a director and producer, I am blending my love of sitcoms with the documentary format, and so it leans heavily into the domestic comedy jokes and the fast pace of our upbringing.
At times, we see real-time visuals of people enjoying Grandma’s house, contrasting with the reality of Grandma’s experience through voice overs. It has taken me years to come to terms with the sale, and it’s been through this film that I’ve been able to understand why Grandma did it, and her point of view.
I have loved the challenge of shaping a story around collections of memories, and I hope to even turn this story into a scripted show of the same name.
Through this film, I aim to preserve the precious memories of the ‘Old Coledale’ from 2018 and before, highlighting the importance of family heritage and local history, which will resonate with a wide audience. We hope the film will make older audiences feel seen and heard, that it will capture nostalgia as well as appeal to new millennials who can relate to the cost-of-living crisis.
I plan to submit to international and national film festivals before attempting to have it acquired by a broadcast channel.
For the past eight months, local emerging editor Tyrone McCrystal and I have been working on the edit voluntarily. We are currently crowdfunding to raise costs to assist with the completion and distribution. All crowdfunding supporters will receive a credit in the film.
To support the crowdfunding campaign and find out more, please follow this link.
Grandma has done so much for our family, and the town at large, so this is for her.
Thank you to all the sponsors who have already jumped on board.
About the writer
Holly Trenaman is a writer and filmmaker based on Dharawal land, interested in comedy. She works part-time at Screen Illawarra as the Projects and Relations Manager while freelancing in the film industry. With a Bachelor of Screen Production from AFTRS, and a Masters of Creative Writing at UTS, she’s the writer/director of a 6-part web series titled SISTAS, and award-winning short film Dating Violet, which premiered at Flickerfest in 2022, and can be found on YouTube.
