Biography
A graduate of the Australian Film Television and Radio School, Ray Argall has enjoyed a colorful and productive presence in filmmaking spanning more than four decades, working as a director, producer, DOP, editor and writer on features, short dramas and documentaries.
He established a reputation as one of Australia's most innovative cinematographers through his work on features such as Wrong World, The Prisoner of St Petersberg and more recently Look Both Ways.
Ray's first feature, Return Home, received the 1990 AFI Award for best director, the Film Critics Circle of Australia Award for Best Director and Best Film; and screened at Berlin, Edinburgh, Seattle and a retrospective in Cannes. He was a set-up director for the award winning ABC drama series SeaChange and MDA; and produced numerous music videos for Midnight Oil, Split Enz, Crowded House, and Hoodoo Gurus among others.
Ray was President of the Australian Directors Guild (ADG) from 2006 to 2015 where he represented Australian filmmakers in many forums, and presented discussions on the Australian industry and its filmmakers at festivals around the world.
In 2016 Ray launched a business restoring archival films, starting with his own back catalog and expanding to the work of other filmmakers including Winter’s Harvest (Brian McKenzie 1979), Lost (Jo Kennedy 1999), Me and Daphne (David Hay, Martha Ansara 1977) and the re-release of Australian Made Redux (Richard Lowenstein 1987).
In 1984, rock band Midnight Oil gave Ray unfettered access to film them both on and off stage during a grueling national tour, undertaken just as lead singer Peter Garrett was running for Senate - and Australian kids were discovering the power of activism for the first time. The resulting treasure trove of more than 25,000 feet of footage then sat gathering dust for over 30 years until Midnight Oil: 1984 was released in 2018, a ‘riveting documentary time capsule’* labor of love that saw Ray trawling through and restoring hours of the unseen archival 16mm film over eight years, along with shooting new interviews for context. Filmink hailed it as ‘a blistering audio-visual testament to a tight-knit, independent, politically charged rock band at the height of their creativity and the peak of their performance prowess’.
