Sowing Seeds of Gold

One of five Western Sydney creatives selected for In the Room, Lebanese Australian playwright and filmmaker James Elazzibrings family drama and filmic freedom to a cinematic collaboration between Co-Curious and Powerhouse.

In his most recent short, Seeds of Gold (2023), Lebanese Australian playwright and filmmaker James Elazzi scatters hopes and dreams as a group of migrants from the Lebanese Civil War toil as farm labourers under the hot Australian sun. What sustains them in the haze of heat is the tantalising prospect of gold and also the memory of life back in Lebanon: the wind off the Mediterranean and the taste of salt on their lips. ‘I don’t want us to get used to it here on this farm,’ Marta tells her grown-up daughter Salifa in the tin shed that serves as their home, filled with candles and Christian icons. ‘Today would’ve been my last day at university in Beirut.’ Such shifts of time and culture bring a bittersweet quality to Seeds of Gold, which was based on the migration experience of Elazzi’s mother in the 1970s. It also echoes his own upbringing on a cucumber farm south-west of Sydney. ‘Imagination can grow wild living out there,’ he says.

Now based in Western Sydney, and honed by an MFA in Dramatic Writing at the National Institute of Dramatic Art and participation in the Sydney Theatre Company’s Emerging Writers Group, Elazzi’s writerly imagination has grown spectacularly since his first opportunity six years ago: a five-minute play reading at the National Theatre of Parramatta. ‘I took that opportunity and ran with it,’ he says. ‘It was like someone had passed me a piece of gold.’ The diasporic experiences of his parent’s generation and the cultural conflicts of forging a new identity in an urban environment of differing idols have proved fertile fields for the writer, with an outpouring of plays staged in recent years, including (2019) at Griffin Theatre Company and (2022) at Belvoir, accompanied by a wave of major award nominations.