Screen Australia Invests in 16 Features
An eclectic set of projects have been granted funding...
Screen Australia has just announced almost $400,000 in development funding to take sixteen feature film projects from the script stage into the production phase. Six projects will receive continued development support, while ten new projects have been added to the development slate.
Screen Australia's Head of Development Martha Coleman said, "The calibre of feature projects coming to the Development Department is outstanding. There's a general acknowledgement from the marketplace that our filmmakers have raised the bar and I think the next wave of films in the coming years will be really interesting."
The line-up of new projects to receive support is a particularly diverse field, including a new drama from Nash and Joel Edgerton; the musical, Synchronicity, set to the music of Kylie Minogue and directed by Kriv Stenders, who recently delivered the box office hit Red Dog; and a dark comedy set during the Cronulla riots by writer/director Abe Forsythe, who won 2010's Tropfest for his blackly comic short Shock and who directed 2003's Ned, a satirical take on the Aussie icon.
There is also Disquiet, a psychological thriller from Sleeping Beauty writer/director Julia Leigh (pictured), based on her own book of the same name; as well as Nim's Island: The Return of the Pirates, a sequel to the popular family film Nim's Island, in development from writer Ray Boseley and director Brendan Maher.
Backtrack, a supernatural thriller from writer/director Michael Petroni and producer Jamie Hilton is about a psychologist who discovers that his patients are all ghosts; while Byzantium, from writer/director Cris Jones tells the story of a man trapped in a strange town after a road accident. Producers Angie Fielder and Polly Staniford are developing their romantic comedy script, The Post Office; and writer Duncan Kennedy will develop his comedy Koala Blue.
Other projects to receive funding include a new film from veteran director Bruce Beresford titled Banjo & Matilda, based on the true story of Banjo Paterson; and Jonathan Teplitzky's Choir of Hard Knocks, written by Pip Karmel. Based on the real life choir, the new drama from Teplitzky (who has just begun shooting The Railway Man) chronicles a desperate group of people who band together to find their voice.
Also on the bill is director Peter Andrikidis' romantic comedy, Lex and Eve, about a Greek Orthodox boy who falls in love with a Lebanese Muslim girl; and producer Lisa Shaunessy's slice of science fiction, Chronical, exec producer by Michael Rymer, about the son of a scientist called to the future to solve the world's oxygen crisis.
On a more sombre note is debut feature filmmaker's Sotiris Dounoukos' Joe Cinque's Consolation, an adaptation of the Helen Garner book, which is based on the real 1997 events surrounding Anu Singh, a young law student at the Australian National University who killed her boyfriend by injecting him with heroin and controversially served just four years in prison for it.
For more information and to view the full list of films, head here.
Photo credit: Julia Leigh, courtesy of Getty Images/Matt Carr.
