“He’s one of the warriors, an independent director who does nothing for hire, who makes only films close to his heart, whose humanism you could call spiritual”. These are the words chosen by the late Roger Ebert, one of the most important film critics in history, to describe Paul Cox, the daring Australian filmmaker who passed on Sunday, at the age of 76 years, after a long battle with cancer. Cox is hailed as one of the pioneers of independent cinema in Australia.

His international claim to fame came with Man of Flowers in 1983, which was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1984 Cannes film festival, but he was active as a filmmaker from the mid-1960s until the end of his life. Last year he released Force of Destiny, starring David Wenham, which was based on his own cancer battle before an eleventh-hour liver transplant in 2009 pulled him back from the brink of death. When he was diagnosed, he was told he only had six months to live. He managed to make it seven years. He also suffered from bipolar disorder, something that made filmmaking a much harder struggle for him, but he managed to cope with it. For the past few months, he had been trying to work on a new film, Inferno, addressing the issue of terrorism, but his health failed him.

Born Paulus Henrique Benedictus Cox, he migrated to Australia from the Netherlands in 1965 and worked as a photography teacher at the Prahran College of Advanced Education. In the mid-1960s he began making short films and in 1971 he made his first mid-length documentary Calcutta. His first feature was Illuminations, made in 1976. He continued directing both fiction and documentary films, such as the popular Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh (1987). In 1982, he directed Lonely Hearts, the story of a middle-aged man searching for love through a dating agency. Thus begun his collaboration with Wendy Hughes, who starred in many of his films, not least among them Kostas.

A love story between an Australian woman (Wendy Hughes) and a Greek immigrant (Takis Emmanuel), Kostas was one of the first movies to show life in multicultural Australia. The film was an instant success and it holds a special place in the hearts of Greek Australians in general, and for this newspaper in particular. The film’s hero, Kostas, was a journalist who migrated from Greece to Australia, where he was working as a taxi driver. As the story unfolds, Kostas returns to journalism, working for a Greek newspaper in Melbourne – these scenes were shot in Neos Kosmos offices (then located in Russell Street in the CBD), offering some rare insight into the day-to-day operations of the paper (and some glimpses of actual journalists and other members of our team).