UNBREAKABLE: THE JELENA DOKIC STORY is not just a tennis story. It’s the story of Jelena Dokic’s survival, of her overcoming extraordinary odds, and of her ultimate triumph in the face of poverty, bullying and extreme brutality. It’s about how she survived as a refugee, twice. How she survived on the tennis court as she ascended to become world No.4. But most importantly, how she survived the unimaginable abuse by Damir Dokic, her violent father and coach. It’s a story of growing up – never being alone, but always lonely. Ultimately, it’s the story of how the tennis world and a nation of fans chose to look away when Jelena needed them most. The question is…why?
Unbreakable features first-hand testimony from Jelena, Australian and international tennis greats, including Pam Shriver and Lindsay Davenport, as well as former WTA officials and journalists Chris Clarey of the NY Times, CBS 60 Minutes reporter Jon Wertheim.
As Unbreakable releases in Australian cinemas on November 7, following a stellar debut at the Brisbane International Film Festival, Nick L’Barrow spoke with the documentary’s directors, Jessica Halloran and Ivan O’Mahoney, about bringing Jelena’s story to the screen, and what the word ‘unbreakable’ really means to them.
Nick: The reaction out of the Brisbane International Film Festival seemed so emotionally palpable from the audience. I’m curious to know what that experience was of being in that room, seeing people react to Jelena’s story in such a visceral way?
Jessica Halloran: It’s been just incredible, you know. Having watched it many times, I still get teary in parts, but to see the audience giving Jelena a standing ovation, and also most of them being in tears… we all know a lot of people are affected by family violence or domestic violence, gender-based violence, and I think that’s why this film is moving many people.
Ivan O’Mahoney: Yeah, I agree. I think one of the great joys about doing a feature doc that is theatrically released, is that unlike television, you get a real sense of what the audience feels and thinks. You can hear it as the movie plays, you know? You can hear the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ in the audience. And the anger and compassion, and whatever emotion wells up. Which is something that you forego if you make a television film. This is very real and very intimate, so it was a pretty extraordinary experience at the Brisbane Film Festival, for sure.
Nick: I think there are definitely visuals in this film that lend to the cinematic quality of it. I loved the cutaways to a silhouetted Jelena who is breaking through the glass. I think those images, and where they are placed in the doco, have so much power to them. What were those conversations like between you both in creating this cinematic visual language for Unbreakable?
Ivan O’Mahoney: Well, like with so many things in the film, these ideas sort of had a lot of fathers and mothers [laughs]. I remember talking to Bonnie Elliot, who is one of my favourite DOPs in Australia, about wanting to shoot really cinematic material that was quite abstract for this film, to really help us through those moments where we needed a visual moment of pause. Where you could really let things settle, and think about what you had just heard.
And Bonnie had just seen a shot of a skateboarder going through a glass window in slow motion. Then we workshopped that a bit with the title of Unbreakable, and we thought there was no point in just somebody crashing through a window for this, but the idea of shattering a glass pane whereby you may be falling down, it started symbolising all kinds of things around mental health. Then being able to reverse that shot at the end, emerging like a phoenix from the ashes, so to speak, came about.
Then we talked about how we were actually going to do it. We couldn’t find sugar glass that was big enough, they don’t make it in Australia anymore in that size. We had conversations around safety glass, but we couldn’t do that because it still had a big risk of cutting people. And in the end, we talked to the VFX people at Spectrum Films, and they came up with the idea of shooting two shots. One of a dummy falling through a glass window, and another of a stuntwoman, Olga Miller, falling down, and matching them exactly using VFX.
The other stuff we really talked about was what can we do that will really lift this cinematically? And the idea of shooting a lot of those shots on a Phantom with crazy frame rates of like 1000 frames-per-second came about. Plus, Bonnie had all these crazy lenses and crystals that she could put in front of the lens, and that created the warped vision. It was wonderful. There was a lot of trial and error, but we committed to the idea.
Nick: Jessica, having worked with Jelena on the biography Unbreakable back in 2019, and having conversations with her about her experiences, I’m curious to know what the experience was like for you this time around talking with her about these events again?
Jessica Halloran: It was incredibly fascinating. I mean, starting with Jelena, when I wrote the book with her, she was incredibly broken. She’s still, to this day, recovering from the trauma of her childhood. But she was a person that would not ever really leave the house much because she was stalked by strangers. She was in a really dark place.
But the book started to life that burden, and again, the film has done that to another level, I think. Unpacking all this trauma on camera is like a heavy, hard task. But I think the dark beauty of this, having this be on film, is the ability to bring other perspectives on that time into it, which I think we did to the best of our ability.
Getting the likes of Lindsey Davenport, Pam Schrieber, journalists at the New York Times, CBS, 60 Minutes, Renee Stubbs. All of these people fronting up and speaking about what they saw in the moment I think really elevated her story. It’s not just a singular viewpoint.
Nick: I think the world ‘unbreakable’ means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Obviously with the film also being titled after the book makes sense, but I was wondering if there were any conversations between you both about what the work ‘unbreakable’ meant to you? And what it meant to telling Jelena’s story?
Jessica Halloran: I think that she’s still alive and standing today, that’s what unbreakable is. She has constantly said to me that if she had not told her story, or had the ability to bring her story from book to film, she doesn’t think she would be alive.
This is the role that telling her story has played in this, you know, path of healing. You underestimate how important it has been. She said to me that it’s like narrative therapy telling the story again. It alleviates, lifts a burden that she’s been carrying which was obvious throughout the film. She’s been silenced for a very long time. That’s my take on that.
Ivan O’Mahoney: For me, I’ve always struggled with the title in the sense that we filmed Jelena for a very long time. We’ve been working with Jelena for a very long time. We started in 2019 originally, and it was delayed because of COVID, which had a big impact on financing. It had a big impact on her availability. She was stuck in the Melbourne lockdowns; we were stuck in the Sydney lockdowns.
But I also guess I’ve been a witness to Jelena’s change over the last five years or so. And when we started, I was always wondering about the title, because while I believe she was incredibly strong, and resilient, and working on putting herself back together again, I didn’t feel like she was unbroken. I actually thought there was a lot of trauma, a lot of issues.
The more time we spent together over the years, watching her get stronger, more confident, to the point where she really now seems a lot better, I feel like the title is incredibly justified. The title became more and more prophetic. But it’s interesting how you look at a word and how you look at a situation. Yes, she is now unbreakable. But we can’t pretend that she wasn’t affected by it. I think there was a time where she was broken, but I think she is healing and doing that remarkably.
Nick: To start wrapping up our chat, documentary filmmaking really allows you to deeply investigate people’s lives and their personalities. And when you make a film about a story like, Jelena’s, I wonder how her tenacity and strength inspires you as filmmakers? Even though it’s a drastically different situation, how does Jelena’s story light a fire for yourselves as storytellers?
Jessica Halloran: Yeah, I think Jelena’s story is quite the anomaly in that she’s sort of the lone person who has come forward in the world of sport… I mean, we’ve had Athlete A, which is an incredible series. But as a lone person, coming forward and telling her story like she has, I think that’s incredibly powerful.
For me, I feel like there are so many women sports stories, past and present, that need to be told and told well. Not just skimming over the surface. So, her story inspired me to hopefully do more work like this.
Ivan O’Mahoney: When I see people display this kind of bravery that she has, I think it just makes me want to amplify the voice and amplify the message, and help shape it as a storyteller in a way to partner with people who have gone through trauma like that, and who are coming out of the other end incredibly strong and resilient. Those who can help others by sharing their story, and removing the stigma on certain issues.
We’ve been involved in a number of projects like this, and we’re doing another one at the moment. It just sort of makes you feel like you have the tools to do it, so you kind of owe it to society to use them to the best of your ability. And I think that’s what this documentary is ultimately about.
Thank you so much to Jessica and Ivan for their time, and to Roadshow Films and M4M Agency for organising the interview. Unbreakable: The Jelena Dokic Story is in Australian cinemas from November 7.
