A Portrait of Love

When Archibald Prize-winning artist Craig Ruddy was cruelly taken way too soon due to complications from COVID-19, his long-term partner in love and business, actor Roberto Meza Mont (Candy), was devastated.

Padding around their Byron Bay hinterlands home surrounded by his lover’s viscerally tactile portraits – including Cathy Freeman, Warwick Thornton, Bruce Pascoe and the late, impossibly great David Gulpilil – he was a lost soul looking for some way to commemorate their incredible love for one another. Along came friend and filmmaker Molly Reynolds (My Name is Gulpilil), who hit upon crafting this moving tribute to a creative force that burned so bright using only Mont’s smartphone footage and his poetic elegy as narratorial connective tissue. You’ll need plenty of tissues at the ready.