Ken Park

Timelines: All, Australia Categories: 2000s, Australia, Country, Decade, Film, Government, Law, Media

Date: 2003

Australia

Ken Park picks up on similar themes and style of the film Kids (1995), employing the gritty and realistic directorial vision of Larry Clark. Ken Park, however, further pushes the boundaries of a film about adolescents as it depicts graphic scenes of child sexual abuse, masturbation (specifically auto-erotic asphyxiation), murder, and suicide. The opening scene depicts one teenager shooting himself, which, at the film’s conclusion, the audience finds out was due to his girlfriend’s pregnancy. The main characters Sean, Claude, Tate, and Peaches must negotiate daily negative experiences involving parental expectations and abuse; problematic sexual relations with people in positions of care; and child sexual abuse. As Tate is carted off by Police for killing his care-giver grandparents, the final sequence depicts a three-way sex scene between Peaches, Claude and Sean. Co-directed by Clark and Edward Lachman, and written by Harmonie Korinne (who also wrote Kids), the film received mixed reactions from critics. Debates on the film’s classification in Australia found difficulty addressing the issue of child protection in this sexually explicit film.

Before the film was due to be screened at Film Festivals in Melbourne and Sydney, but before it could be submitted to the classification authority by the Festival, it was submitted for classification by a commercial distributor, Potential Films, on VHS video. The prospect of the film’s commercial release greatly changed the classification outcome. The film was refused classification by the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) and this was upheld by the Classification Review Board. In Sydney, the festival instead held a forum on censorship where Clark himself made the comment: “Everybody who knows my work knows I am a serious artist, I am not a pornographer” (quoted in Barber, 2003). The Classification Review Board (CRB) determined the film to be refused classification based on cumulative impact of a number of “high impact” scenes and themes, scenes depicting “actual sex” (referring to the final threesome scene), fetish material exceeding X18+, depictions of “child sexual abuse material”. On the “actual sex” determination, the CRB quoted the classification guidelines that the “general rule is ‘simulation, yes – the real thing, no’” (OFLC Review Report, 2003). The CRB also referred to the New Zealand OFLC’s determination on Ken Park which had released the film under strict conditions including a tertiary education or film festival setting. In reaching their decision, the NZ OFLC consulted with clinical and organisational psychologists who stated the film could be construed as “instructional” in depicting auto-erotic asphyxiation, and that, in depicting young people under 18, could also be seen to exploit young people for sexual purposes (NZ OFLC Classification Review Report, 2003).

Legendary host of the Australian review show ‘At the Movies’ Margaret Pomeranz (left in the above image) spoke out about the film’s censorship. Attending an organised screening of the film which was broken up by Police, she urged the general public to take note of the ‘dangerous’ levels of national censorship that the decision represented, arguing that the film should be seen and debated. – Rachel Cole