Moving Out is a 1983 film about a young Italian-Australian adolescent in Melbourne directed by Michael Pattinson.
Pattinson met Jan Sardi, who was a school teacher wanting to move into writing. They discussed making the movie as a 50-minute film and it evolved into a feature. Most of the money was raised privately except for $50,000 from the Australian Film Commission.
The movie was shot over six weeks in various schools in inner Melbourne. It was shot on 16 mm and blown up to 35mm.
Story
Gino Condello (Vince Colosimo) is an Italian Australian high school student in the inner suburb of Fitzroy in Melbourne.
Gino's best mate is the hyperactive class clown Renato (Maurice Devincentis) and the pair like to hang around in a wrecked car in a derelict lot with bogan, mullet-decorated Allan (Tibor Gyapjas), and blonde Sandy (Sally Cooper) who is infatuated with Gino, and the boisterous, blunt, overweight Helen (Desiree Smith).
Gino's father (Peter Sardi) and mother (Kate Jason) are routinely worried by the behaviour and attitudes of their teenage son, caught between the two worlds of being a 'wog' and being an Australian, not helped because they aren't fluent in English, and need Gino to help them interact with the Anglo world.
In the corner of the kitchen, like a brooding, rosary-wielding presence, sits a grandmother (Josephine Russian) clearly not long for this world.
Gino's world is flung into further turmoil by the arrival from Italy of some 'cousins' who will take over the family home in inner-urban Fitzroy, while Gino and his family will move out to the plush Italian mansion lifestyle of Doncaster - especially as the new arrivals include the disturbingly serene and angelic Maria (Nicole Miranda), though the new arrivals also include the irritating young Pippo (Julio Dalleore), who is always bugging Gino about something.
At school Gino endures a series of battles - the deaf old English teacher Mr Aitkins (Brian James) insists that he recite Dorothea Mackellar's poem "My Country" ("I love a sunburnt country") which has absolutely no meaning for his inner urban lifestyle
Art teacher Miss Stanislaus (Sandy Gore) encourages Gino to make a sculpture of a clenched fist, while the no nonsense science teacher Mr. Clarke (Ivar Kants) dishes it out to his charges as he gives them a lesson in static electricity.
Gino hangs loose with his mates, drinking beer and smoking, playing pinball, arguing with his parents, and deliberately mis-tranlating to his father what Mr Clarke has to say about his schoolwork.
Romantic matters build to a head when Gino dances with Maria at an Italian party in Doncaster, but then egged on by Renato, who says he knows the owner, Gino decides with the rest of the gang to break into an up-market home.
Renato pairs off with Helen and it seems that at last Gino might make out with Sandy, but just as they get to kissing stage, the cops arrive.
Gino and Sandy make a break for it, but inevitably Gino and his parents are dragged down to the station for a dressing down.
The trouble with the law is swept away by a flurry of incidents - the school's toilet block catches fire because of a wayward student cigarette, Mr Clarke's class is disrupted by a fart, Gino's grandmother dies, and soon enough it's time for Gino to say farewell to his old classmates, his old school and his old teachers.
The removal van arrives and there's just time for a few more reconciliations, as Maria smiles and waves Gino farewell, and Gino drags a Collingwood football club beanie over Pippo's head.
"That it?", asks the removalist, as Gino contemplates the red fist sculpture broken by Pippo, and says it is.
"Right, let's go", the removalist adds, as the van pulls into the street, and the camera cranes up to give us a last sight of Gino as he heads away from Fitzroy, into the wilds of an uncertain future in doric-pillared Doncaster ...
Cast
Vince Colosimo as Gino
Sally Cooper as Sandy
Tibor Gyapjas as Allan
Maurice Devincentis as Renato
Desiree Smith as Helen
Production
Director Michael Pattinson made much later in publicity of his casting techniques for the film, claiming that he had seen and interviewed some 2,000 teenagers in Melbourne schools.
Pattinson in the first instance avoided standard audition techniques and instead asked the teenagers to tell jokes:
"Schools were very helpful when we lined up auditions for the kids," Mr Pattinson says. "We'd ask the kids to tell a joke, one with a story, it didn't matter how dirty. It turned out to be a good test of whether they could act in front of a camera." (The Age 19th April 1983)