Headquartered in Sydney, Lantern Pictures is a new collaborative screen venture that champions female voices and narrative perspectives with a vision to develop and sustain a true creative driven showrunner model for the Australian TV industry.
Lantern co-founder Sarah Lambert said: “No matter what’s going on in international markets, the one thing that cuts through is bold, visionary storytelling. Lantern Pictures is unashamedly writer/creator centric, creating television with a strong authorial voice that will resonate with audiences around the world. We’re driven by a passion for exploring characters and worlds we haven’t seen before and making shows with heart that get under your skin.”
Backed by experience, The Lantern Picture trio brings a wealth of local and international screen industry experience to this new venture.
- Sarah Lambert is one of the most prolific Australian screenwriters and has created, written and produced some of the most iconic dramas of the last ten years. Stories about women have been at the heart of her success. Most recently she was creator and showrunner of the award-winning The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (Made Up Stories/ Amazon) which won multiple awards and broke records as the most successful ever Australian Amazon Original launch globally. She was also writer and showrunner on the critically acclaimed and multi-award winning series, Lambs of God (Lingo/Foxtel), following up with another Lingo collaboration on the adaptation of Markus Zusak’s The Messenger (ABC). She also the creator of the hit series Love Child (Nine Network) which ran for four seasons.
- Jane is an award-winning director and writer whose recent work includes the documentary series Back to Nature (as creator, series producer and writer-director), and Deep Rising, narrated by Jason Momoa. She was director-writer of Ka-Ching! Pokie Nation, earning a Special Mention at the Australian Directors’ Guild awards, and wrote and directed multiple episodes of many acclaimed series, such as Who Do You Think You Are? After many years directing and writing documentaries, Jane will return to her drama roots with Lantern by adapting extraordinary true stories.
- Andrew Lambert is an experienced television executive and lawyer who worked in Sydney and New York. Most recently he was Director of Business Affairs at Foxtel where his job included running their larger TV and film licensing deals and managing the commercial side of their original productions. Prior roles include running the commercial division of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Director of Content and Commercial with Lightbox (now Neon, Sky New Zealand’s streaming service).
Why Lantern Pictures, and why now?
Since the global success of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, Sarah has had many offers to write and be the showrunner for series in the US and Europe. Though the scale and ambition of those projects was exciting, she really wanted to produce the same scale of projects back home in Australia. It became clear there was an opportunity to bring some of those productions here to Australia, with her as showrunner.
“It felt like the right moment to form a fully-fledged production company to make that a reality”, Sarah said.
Sarah had been talking for some years about creating a company together with her long-term friend and collaborator, director/writer Jane Manning and with her brother, TV executive and lawyer Andrew Lambert.
“It’s always been our goal to create a female-led company that places writers and creators at the heart of their productions, empowering and supporting them,” Sarah said.
Despite the rise of premium female-driven storytelling, there is still huge scope to empower female and diverse creators in Australia. Through embracing the showrunner model we hope to nurture the groundswell of female-led and diverse talent that Australia has, to create inventive and ground-breaking premium drama, Manning added.
With many years of collective production experience, and great relationships both here and overseas, Lantern Pictures has developed a slate of their own original content and intend to follow a collaborative approach and partner with Australian and overseas producers.
Andrew Lambert said the TV industry is adjusting to a new reality in terms of the scale of productions. However, from a network perspective “compelling stories, high-quality production values and cost efficiency will continue to drive global demand for Australian produced content into the future. At Lantern we have strong industry relationships, and we look forward to exploiting the amazing opportunities for co-productions we see out there.”
About Lantern Pictures
Founded by screen industry veterans Sarah Lambert, Jane Manning and Andrew Lambert, Lantern Pictures is an Australian-based screen production company that empowers female-centric storytelling, creativity, development and production for a global audience.
With a belief that a creative-led approach to television production yields the most powerful content, Lantern Pictures are championing the showrunner model to create premium content and develop a community of showrunner screen professionals that will be trailblazing, globally competitive and shift the equilibrium back to creativity.
