Five filmmakers with strong, ambitious and engaging documentary projects have been selected to participate in Headlands 2008. Headlands is a ten week intensive documentary development program, comprising a one week residential workshop in Melbourne from April 7th – 11th 2008, followed by nine weeks of supported writing time and two final days of marketplace preparation for the selected projects. The projects developed at Headlands will be taken to the AIDC to pitch in 2009.
An announcement of the selected filmmakers and projects was made by Mitzi Goldman, Co-Head of Documentary at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, at AIDC last week. The selected participants include filmmakers from around Australia including the Northern Territory, Western Australia, Tasmania, South Australia and Victoria. Headlands offers these filmmakers the opportunity to develop their documentary projects with expert advice from International and National advisors and feedback from other participants.
Headlands is an initiative of the Documentary Department at AFTRS with the generous support of the AFC, Film Victoria, Screen Tasmania, SAFC, ScreenWest, and the Northern Territory Film Office.
The selected projects are;
From the Northern Territory, Dixi Joy Bankier, based in Darwin is at an advanced stage of research with a project she has been dedicated to for years. Warriors of the North, is a film exploring the extraordinarily surprising varieties of experience that WW2 brought to Indigenous communities along our northern coast.
The Western Australian story concerns the ambitions of an Iraqi refugee, a survivor as a child of the 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein. Son of Samawah is being developed by WA filmmakers Kelvin Ha and Shelley Craddock.
From Tasmania, Abi Binning and Troy Melville from Hobart have an ambitious essay film Scarce Food that investigates anxieties around an emerging global sustenance crisis as climate change and population growth transform our environments.
From Victoria Joan Robinson and John Moore are engaging with the personal lives of a family living with the pressure of a high profile trial in Victoria under recent anti-terrorism laws.
South Australia brought us a story from Karen Hughes, Searching for Stelu which concerns a recent history of Rumania and questions of tyranny, memory and history under Ceausescu.
The projects invited into the Headlands process are ambitious in the breadth and depth of the themes their stories embrace.
‘There is a strong mix of local stories and international stories, frequently both at the same time. There is a spectrum of work from the personal, polemical essay film through to open-ended long term observational work’, said Headlands Director, John Hughes.
The films address the past, present and the future. The filmmakers are a welcome mix of experienced and ’emerging’ filmmakers and all are very committed to creative documentary practice.
The workshop, or ‘documentary laboratory’ will encourage a supportive environment among peers for rigorous interrogation of the projects, with a view to opening up possibilities for exploring alternative, inventive treatments, strategies and approaches to the real world material that the films depict. The development workshop will be equally interested in helping the projects explore ways of positioning themselves in the market with a view to cross platforming opportunities to enhance financing possibilities.
Advisors to the workshop include well known Australian filmmakers Pat Fiske and Mitzi Goldman from the AFTRS, independent Tom Zubrycki, Anna Grieve of Film Australia and Headlands director, filmmaker John Hughes.
Headlands is delighted to have secured the participation as international advisor of Iikka Vehkalahti, filmmaker and commissioning editor with Finland’s YLE. Iikka is highly respected and active in international documentary practice.
‘We are looking forward to working with all the filmmakers on these exciting projects and to seeing them find their national and international audiences’ said AFTRS Headlands advisors, Mitzi Goldman and Pat Fiske.
[release from AFTRS]