Director Ryan Gaskett
Score 5/6

Tracking the life of Australian chainsaw artist Leigh Conkie, Leigh is a portrait of a man who has used his experiences of abuse, destruction and loss to craft a life of service, connection and meaning.

If memory serves me this is the second documentary that I have watched featuring Leigh Conkie’s work Greensborough War Memorial Park that had to be removed because of water damage in 2017. The other documentary Homefront was featured in the Melbourne documentary film festival back in 2019. The connection only dawned on me after I had finished watching Leigh.
When I heard that Conkie was referred to as “The Keith Richards of chainsaw sculpting” was something that I had to watch the moniker itself was more than enough to give me a few chuckles and fuel a need to find out more about Leigh Conkie. Leigh certainly isn’t what I would regard as a “stereotypical documentary” I generally think that the stereo typical doco is something that has a talking head somebody like Louis Theroux. Though I have found myself documentaries in the past year that were not structured in that traditional way and I have found myself less concerned with that criteria. I thought the points that were made about Legih’s approach to safety where interesting and frightening all in the same breath. Gaskett delivered a beautifully shot documentary that seemed to be very honest in the way that it portrayed Leigh. I was a little surprised to see that Derryn Hinch was featured in the documentary, though considering Mr. Hinch’s views on child abuse, it would be more of a surprise if he wasn’t featured in the documentary. I loved the Asylum Seeker statue that Leigh created during the documentary. I loved how Gaskett filmed the sequence of Leigh installing the statue in front of the headquarters for The Age newspaper. Thinking back on it the whole sequence was a more involved process then I thought it would be. I also found myself emotionally invested to a degree Leigh’s trip to Mt Fuji.