Battleground Melbourne

directed: Topher Field AU 2022, 1h 45m

Battleground Melbourne charts the fall of the World's Most Liveable City, through the eye’s of those who risked everything to save it.

With the arrival of Covid in early 2020, events began to unfold in Victoria much as they had unfolded elsewhere in the world, but all that soon changed and Victoria embarked on a bold and destructive mission to eradicate Covid entirely.

Lockdowns were extraordinarily long and harshly enforced, the mental, economic, and social harms were astronomical, and the protests and pushback from the people of Victoria was brutally repressed.

This feature length documentary is presented from the perspective of the protestors and their supporters, to address many of the baseless smears and lazy attacks from Government, Police, and Media alike, and ensure that the people of Melbourne who stood up for Human Rights when it mattered most cannot simply be erased from history.

Mixing interviews with eye-witnesses with news reports and with gritty real-world footage from the front lines, Battleground Melbourne is confronting, raw, heartbreaking, yet funny and hopeful too.

This is the story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things in the face of terrible opposition, and standing their ground for their rights and their children’s future.

Topher Field is a leading Australian libertarian political commentator, human rights activist, and film maker. Topher has been selected as a finalist in Tropfest and the Austin Film Festival, and is a winner of the "Libertarian Activist of the Year" award.

After being introduced to film and TV as a child, Topher worked his way through the ranks as a camera operator and editor before studying acting, and then migrating to writing and directing. Along the way Topher became a well known Australian Political Commentator, but 12 years as a political commentator, Topher is now best known for his work since March 2020 when his home city of Melbourne began down the path to becoming the most locked down city on earth and descended into shocking scenes of police brutality and government oppression which have been seen around the world.

Topher began speaking out at the first anti-lockdown protest in April 2020 with just 70 people in attendance, and is still fighting today and speaking at protests with in excess of 450,000 people.

For his work standing up for basic human rights, Topher has been harrassed by police in his home, physically assaulted at protests, and finally arrested and charged by the Victorian Government with the trumped up charge of "incitement", a charge intended for use against terrorist masterminds which is now being put to work against political commentators and human rights activists in Victoria.

Topher describes himself as "Pro Human, Pro Freedom, Pro Individualism", is best known for his videos and for his speeches at protests and now for the feature documentary Battleground Melbourne. Topher lives by the motto: "Good people break bad laws".