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Drowning wins NFSA Orlando Award

Craig Boreham’s short film Drowning is making waves more than three years after it was completed.

Having screened at numerous festivals around the world, including as part of the Cinema des Antipodes program at Cannes last year, Boreham has won the NFSA Orlando Award for the short.

Presented at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, the NFSA Orlando Award is presented to the best lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex short Australian film. It's a medium in which Boreham  – an IF Award Rising Talent nominee in 2010 – has made a name for himself, with shorts such as Violet screening at international film festivals.

“The really beautiful thing about a short film generally is that it can often just be the exploration of a small idea… it’s freer in a way,” the writer/director said.

However, Drowning, which tells the story of the changing relationship between two teenagers (Miles Szanto and Xavier Samuel) was not always intended to be a short.

“I actually wrote the feature script first before we made the short film and then adapted that to find the short story within it,” Boreham said, adding that the reason he opted to make the story a short first was because “it was a good way of showing people who might be interested in the feature, the tone. It was a good way of exploring the characters and the performance style in a smaller way before we went ahead with the feature film.”

Despite completing work on Drowning more than three years ago, Boreham has returned to the script and confesses that it has always been present in his mind. “We’ve been sort of developing the script into a feature script for the past couple of years so it’s still very much present but it’s just turned into a different form.”

With work on the script finally complete, the film is currently seeking financing and Boreham is eager to begin shooting on his first feature.


On the set of Drowning with director Craig Boreham (R) and director of photography Bonnie Elliott (L). Photo by Hugh Rutherford.


The poster shot for Drowning with actors Miles Szanto, Tess Haubrich and Xavier Samuel. Photo by Jeremy Mason McGraw.