RETIRED Catholic priest Edward Sedevic is a film buff, a hoarder, a man who has more than 3000 carefully catalogued and categorised DVDs in the Central Coast home he shares with his sister.
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There they were in trays, shelves and containers on the morning police arrived last year – films like Jindabyne, The Castle and Newsfront in the Australian section; The Very Best of Dire Straits and The Bee Gees Greatest Hits in music, and The World’s Most Extraordinary Prayers in a category all on its own.
In August last year when police from State Crime Command’s sex crimes unit knocked on his door, and later asked the nervous cleric why he had so many DVDs stored in his bedroom, the answer was space.
We’re now looking at these films and scrutinising them in a way that they were never looked at when they were made
- Paul Brennan
‘‘Because there are a lot of videos down in my dungeon, whatever you call it,’’ he said, a little flustered, but it explained the films stacked in his bedroom like a suburban video library.
It was in Father Sedevic’s Scandinavian section that his problems really started – as if police knocking on a Catholic priest’s door on a winter morning to ask questions about a Canadian website caught up in a global child pornography sting wasn’t problem enough.
Three films – one Swedish, one Danish, one French – were taken away, and some time later his possession of those films led to child pornography charges against him.
Father Sedevic, 73, whose name graces a Catholic welfare centre in Sydney, became an unlikely player in an unusual case in a Gosford courtroom on July 31 – when a magistrate was required to determine the point at which art becomes child pornography.
What made it all the more unusual is that the art in question included a Swedish film only recently, and controversially, banned in Australia, despite being more than 30 years old.
It also included a Danish film that was freely available to borrow from the priest’s local public library, at Toukley.
All charges against Father Sedevic were dismissed on July 31, although the priest admitted he had been ‘‘flitting ... through these pornographic sites without seeing them’’ only the night before the police knocked on the door.
But after the Commonwealth DPP withdrew a charge linked to his use of a computer to access a website, and another charge was dismissed because the actors in a film were judged not under age (so the film was simply a legal pornographic movie), it was only charges linked to the seized films that Gosford Local Magistrate Alan Railton had to consider.
Foremost in those considerations was: how do we today regard films made 40 years ago, according to accepted standards of that time, when those standards included depicting naked children in sexually explicit scenes which are now regarded as sexually abusive and exploitative?
As Railton noted, while considering the artistic merits of the films against the obvious legal issues raised by scenes involving naked children in sexual contexts: ‘‘This comes back to ... what is the meaning of child abuse material, and whether a reasonable person would regard the material as offensive.’’
And as Australia is confronted by shocking evidence at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse showing widespread historic sexual abuse of children, and the systemic covering-up of that abuse, what to do about material from the past contravening more informed views of the present, without crossing into zealotry?
As Railton said of the decision to charge Sedevic for possessing the films, after a search warrant prompted by the priest’s contact with the suspect Canadian website: ‘‘I understand the difficulty for police in these matters.’’
The issue is even more complicated by recent prosecutions in the Hunter, in other parts of Australia and overseas, of so many sexual abusers for crimes committed 30, 40 and even 50 years ago. These have included successful prosecutions of high profile offenders like Rolf Harris and Robert Hughes, where significant questions have been asked about how they were able to continue offending for so long, given the number of witnesses.
Behaviour by both Harris and Hughes that would send alarm bells ringing today was routinely dismissed or minimised in the past.
The three films taken from Father Sedevic’s house – Barnens o (Children’s Island) by Swedish director Kay Pollak, Du er ikke alene (You Are Not Alone) by Danish director Lasse Nielsen, and J’irai comme un cheval fou (I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse), were made in the turbulent 1970s, long before child sexual abuse was subject to mandatory reporting laws, or was prominent in the media.
As Nielsen noted in a 2010 interview about his highly regarded and ‘‘groundbreaking’’ film about teenage sexuality, You Are Not Alone, which includes a brief scene showing two boys, aged 12 and 15, embracing and showering naked together: ‘‘I don’t believe the film could be made today.’’
I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse, a surrealist drama from 1973 which is still occasionally shown at film festivals around the world, includes a brief scene involving a gagged naked child. Railton accepted Sedevic’s evidence that he owned the film but had not seen it, and was not aware it contained such a scene.
It was issues related to the third film, Barnens o, that Railton admitted caused him ‘‘quite a degree of angst’’.
The film about an 11-year-old boy on the verge of puberty was made in 1979, won Sweden’s most prestigious film prize, the Guldbagge, in 1980, and was Sweden’s entry for best foreign language film at the 54th Academy Awards.
It included a sexually explicit scene showing the boy’s response to a naked woman.
Sedevic was charged with having two versions of the film, one a DVD and the other downloaded on to his computer.
Railton dismissed two charges linked to the film after Sedevic’s barrister, Anthony Tudehope, argued the Classification Review Board had briefly, in 2013, classified a version of the film R-rated for viewing by over-18s, until it overturned the decision in October last year following an appeal by the Australian Federal Police. The process provided the priest with an available defence.
The film was also, on police evidence to the court, ‘‘innocuous’’, and the sexually explicit scene had, at one point, been accepted by the Classification Review Board as ‘‘naturalistic’’ and within the context of the total film, Railton said.
He accepted Tudehope’s submission that to be accepted as child abuse material, the three films had to have ‘‘offended against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults, and bearing in mind the literary, artistic and educational merit of the material’’.
Railton found the sexually explicit scenes in the three films were ‘‘very, very small snippets out of a total movie’’.
‘‘These are, I suppose I’d say, arthouse movies. Not mainstream. They deal with real life issues. They’re not out and out porn.’’
He noted that You Are Not Alone had been available from Toukley library for an unknown period and had not affected the general standards of the area.
Australian film historian Paul Brennan said the court case was interesting because many successful films from the 1970s that starred children, including mainstream films released on PG ratings, challenged today’s standards of what was acceptable and offensive.
‘‘We’re now looking at these films and scrutinising them in a way that they were never looked at when they were made,’’ Brennan said.
Three films starring children – Pretty Baby from 1978, about a child prostitute and starring Brooke Shields; The Blue Lagoon from 1980, about teenage sexuality and also starring Brooke Shields; and Bugsy Malone from 1976, a gangster film featuring child actors and starring Jodie Foster – were ‘‘tricky and uncomfortable’’ and even ‘‘creepy’’ in some scenes when viewed today, Brennan said.
Although both Pretty Baby and The Blue Lagoon were controversial even when they were made because of the explicit sexual nature of the films, and strong criticism of Brooke Shields’s mother Teri for exploiting her daughter, they were popular movies at the time, Brennan said.
Pretty Baby, made by French director Louis Malle, was nominated for the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1978.
The Blue Lagoon was nomined for Best Major Motion Picture - Family Entertainment in the Young Artist Awards in 1981.
Bugsy Malone was nominated for Best Musical/Comedy at the 1977 Golden Globes and Foster won a BAFTA for best supporting actress.
Brooke Shields later strongly criticised her mother for a childhood that included posing for nude photographs when she was 10, and being depicted in Pretty Baby as a child prostitute whose virginity was auctioned to the highest bidder.
Even scenes from wildly popular Shirley Temple films in the 1930s and 1940s were now regarded with concern, Brennan said.
In February Institute of Public Affairs research fellow Chris Berg accused the Australian Federal Police of ‘‘a bizarre and rather extraordinary overreach’’ for appealing to the Classification Review Board about Barnens o.
‘‘If they believe this is genuine child pornography they should contact their state colleagues and ask them to pursue it. If they are just concerned about offence, then that is none of their business. It is not the AFP’s job to protect people from taking offence,’’ he said.
Last week he said Railton’s dismissal of the charges showed a ‘‘reasonable person’s’’ assessment of the line between child sexual abuse material and brief scenes in historic films with recognised artistic merit.
The major issue was the underlying crime of the sexual abuse of a child to produce material, and prosecution of people for providing a market for genuine child sexual abuse material, Berg said.
‘‘One of the challenges we have in this area is ensuring our justified prohibition of child sexual abuse material does not bring in at the margins things we don’t want to punish.’’
