Wait Means Never (Andrew Groves, 2004)
Andrew Groves’ Wait Means Never, the winner of Best Film at the 2005 Melbourne Underground Film Festival, is a timely and important film that deserves wider distribution than it has thus far received. It tells of four young extreme-left activists – Elizabeth (Rebecca Lowman), Paul (Mark Rizzo), Tom (David Haydn Jones), and Linda (Marissa Petroro) – who grow frustrated by the ineffectiveness of conventional methods of protest, and in desperation kidnap the head of an international oil company and hold him hostage. The film spends roughly equal time on the lead-up to, and the unfolding of, the kidnapping, and explores the psyche of the kidnappers as the situation deteriorates.