South Australian filmmakers have swept this year’s Adelaide Film Festival (AFF) Audience Awards, with Lesbian Space Princess, Songs Inside and the short film Finding Jia all recognised.
Taking out this year’s Feature Fiction Award was Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese’s animated feature Lesbian Space Princess, which follows an anxious space princess who is thrust out of her sheltered life and into a galactic quest to save her bounty hunter ex-girlfriend from the Straight White Maliens.
Along the way, a problematic spaceship and a runaway gay-pop idol join her hazardous encounters with blade-wielding maniacs, dangerous dick turrets, and the scariest thing of all: her own self-doubt. It is the second film to come out of the Film Lab New Voices initiative run by the South Australian Film Corporation, Screen Australia, and Adelaide Film Festival.
Shalom Almond’s feature debut Songs Inside, a documentary following First Nations singer and songwriter Nancy Bates as she leads a music program within the prison in preparation for a performance with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra (ASO), received the Feature Documentary Audience Award.
As part of the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund Film (AFFIF)’s world premiere, members of the ASO, Bates, and members of the prison group Songbirds conducted a performance at the festival.
Alice Yang’s Finding Jia took home the Jury-determined Shorts Award, announced on AFF Closing Night. Produced by Maisie Fabry, the 13-minute film tells of 8-year-old Mei who, while watching TV from the back of her parent’s store, yearns for the picture of Australian home life she sees on screen.
The Audience Awards closed the curtain on this year’s AFF, which creative director and CEO Mat Kesting said set new box office and audience attendance records.
“These awards clearly reflect the audience’s desire to see our own Australian culture and stories on the big screen,” he said.
“The AFF team is thrilled to see these three local films embraced alongside the extraordinary international films presented at AFF. The energy around the festival was palpable with interactions between audiences and filmmakers and sessions selling out across the city. We’ve already started work on the 2025 program and cannot wait to build further on audience engagement in the years to come.”