by Dov Kornits
The Western Australian emerging filmmaker took inspiration from directing funerals to directing short film Milktooth, which is screening at Revelation Perth International Film Festival.
“When I first started directing funerals, I observed that there often seemed to be a degree of regret that came hand-in-hand with grief, an ‘I wish I’d said…’ or ‘I wish I’d known…’ and so the story emerged as this tale of Jane (Ashton Bolt) being haunted by her guilt and that being the ‘milktooth’ she had to grow through in order to fully embrace the ‘adult-tooth’ that is grief.”
Saskia Glass is an actor, a teacher, a writer, director, and funeral director, all of which comes together for her striking short film, Milktooth.
“Christian Linke & Alex Yee’s Arcane is my holy grail, that soundtrack/score is a dream and the animation is jaw-dropping!” she tells us about her filmic influences. “I really love highly-stylised worlds, I aspire for my films to have a flair as discernible as Tim Burton’s or Edgar Wright’s, both of whom really lean into the fantastical and unconventional. I also think it’s really important to stay engaged with my community and the local voices, and I think that’s why I was so drawn to working in the funeral industry. It’s such a unique gateway into so many different walks of life, I’m very grateful to support so many people through one of life’s most difficult trials every day and that has impacted me as an artist unlike anything else.
“My directing process is heavily influenced by my education as an actor, it’s very practical and I love using improvisation in the rehearsal process to evoke authentic dialogue delivery,” says the WAAPA grad. “There are a handful of conversational scenes in the film where I did stand in and feed lines instead of watching the monitor, sometimes it felt like a more effective way to encourage a performance through genuine response rather than literal instruction. For me, directing performance is guiding actors to find purpose in their lines or movements rather than trying to puppeteer the whole production, and in order to facilitate this as best I could for the performers, it made sense to stay omniscient to the story.”
It also helped that Saskia worked with great collaborators. “It is all a testament to the talents of our crew, especially DOP John Rousselet,” she says. “We made this film on a tiny crowdfund and money we saved up working full-time office jobs throughout pre-and-post-production.
“The script came about in July 2023, and we shot the film over 6 days in November of the same year,” she continues. “The edit, colour, sound and score collectively took about 15 months – including the week of me smashing through DaVinci Resolve tutorials on YouTube – and I truly could not have done it without the faith of our wonderful post-production team. Tallulah Armenti, Luke Emin, Aref Rashidan, and Gavin Kerr are wonderful collaborators, and I am so grateful for their patience and trust.”
As a Western Australian creative, how much does Revelation Perth International Film Festival register on her radar? “I attended a wonderful variety of films and workshops last year,” says Saskia. “Revelation always does a fantastic job at supporting emerging artists and making their events accessible, so I’m expecting our screening at the festival will sport a supportive and curious crowd – especially as we have quite a large crew coming to support Milktooth!”
And, what’s next? “There are a few other projects in the works, my computer is packed with pitch decks and scripts for some very fun stories that are quite a departure from the themes of Milktooth but still hold just as much heart!
“In the meantime, I’m looking forward to opportunities to support more indie film shoots and local music videos, it’s so exciting to see Perth’s music scene flourishing along with the steadily-growing film industry. I sincerely hope Milktooth’s story isn’t over yet. I think that it stands as a proof-of-concept for not just the narrative, but also the amount of love our team has for the project, and the amount of work we put into making sure the final product was as polished as possible with the small amount of resources we had.
“Perth is brimming with brilliant talent and I can’t wait to continue creating wonderful, whimsical works of art with the other creatives who call it home.”
Milktooth screens on Sunday 13 July as part of the popular Get Your Shorts On programme at Revelation Perth International Film Festival, more information here.
