The Wog Boy
| The Wog Boy | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Aleksi Vellis |
| Produced by |
Nick Giannopoulos Aleksi Vellis |
| Written by | Nick Giannopoulos Chris Anastassides |
| Starring | Nick Giannopoulos Vince Colosimo Lucy Bell Abi Tucker, John Barresi, Stephen Curry Hung Le Geraldine Turner Tony Nikolakopoulos Derryn Hinch |
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Release date
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Running time
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92 minutes |
| Country | Australia |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $11,449,799 |
The Wog Boy is a 2000 Australian motion picture comedy starring Nick Giannopoulos, Vince Colosimo, Lucy Bell, Abi Tucker, Stephen Curry, Tony Nikolakopoulos and Derryn Hinch.
Steve (Nick Giannopoulos) is a second-generation Greek Australian. Steve is unemployed, but manages to get by, helping out here and there. His pride and joy is his VF Valiant Pacer. Whilst helping out a compensation-oriented neighbour, Steve has a minor car accident involving the Minister for Employment, vampily played by Geraldine Turner. The net result of this encounter is twofold; Steve gets to meet Celia (Lucy Bell) whom he is instantly attracted to but who initially hates him, and Steve gets outed on national television by Derryn Hinch as the worst dole-bludger in Australia.
Steve manages to turn this around to his advantage, and becomes famous as The Wog Boy, spearheading a campaign to improve the employment status of the country. In the interim, he makes variable progress with Celia.
As well as being a comedy, the film offers a fairly subtle critique of capitalism, neoliberalism and the welfare state. The film talks about the issue of unemployment as experienced by everyday people in the 1990s. The film also examines racial profiling, media stereotypes and hysteria, and White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) privilege. It does this by placing the protagonist Steve in a situation where he is asked to do promotional work for a government department. Here we see a series of cultural conflicts where Steve's straightforward ethnic background and attitude meet the politically correct world of White Anglo-Saxon Australia. In the process Steve learns that government workers contribute little to no more effort in their work than those on the dole, and merely use better rhetoric to package their work as a meaningful contribution. While Steve works with the government department he is used as a ruse and media poster boy to convince the poor and unemployed that new social policies for work and welfare are good, when actually they benefit the rich and not the poor.
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Wikipedia