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Five filmmaking teams selected for Springboard

Screen Australia has selected five teams to take part in this year's Springboard: Short Film Initiative and potentially receive $150,000 production funding.

The five directors – Christopher Weekes, Hannah Moon, Tom McKeith, Darlene Johnson and Liselle Mei – and their teams will now develop a short film script that will showcase their developed feature film screenplay. Three of the shorts will then receive $150,000 funding.

Weekes is perhaps the best known after making his debut feature Bitter & Twisted in 2008, which he followed by topping the influential Black List (which ranks Hollywood film executives’ views on the best unproduced movie scripts) in 2009 with The Muppet Man. His Springboard feature project Pest Control is a family comedy about a city that gets overrun by monsters.

Hannah Moon's project Starfish, is a comedy, which she is co-writing with Robin Geradts-Gill and Stephen Sholl. Tom McKeith’s project Boxer is a thriller and is currently being developed through Screen NSW’s Aurora workshop. Darlene Johnson’s project Obelia is based on her mother’s true story growing up in country Australia in 1951 and Liselle Mei’s Red Earth is a Sino-Australian historical romance.

Screen Australia’s head of development, Martha Coleman, said the Springboard process has uncovered exciting new talent and provided support to talented filmmakers already on Screen Australia's radar. "This year’s strong contingent of female voices is particularly exciting and the diversity of stories in this group reflects a healthy, wide range of interests within our emerging film community,” she said in a statement.

Previous Springboard short films include Grant Scicluna’s love story The Wilding, which premiered at Berlinale 2012, and Zak Hilditch’s Transmission, which was nominated for two AACTA Awards and led to his feature film These Final Hours (currently in post-production).

BOXER
Feature Synopsis: A young fighter who has cheated in a fight and killed a man struggles with guilt and searches for forgiveness when, over the course of one night, he is faced with some difficult decisions.
Genre: Thriller
Producer: Robert Coe
Writers: Sam McKeith, Tom McKeith
Director: Tom McKeith

OBELIA
Feature Synopsis: In 1951, an olive-skinned teenager runs away from an Aboriginal Government Reserve and joins a travelling carnival, but finds she can’t out run who she really is. Nor does she want to.
Genre: Drama
Producer: Heather Oxenham
Executive Producer: Phillip Noyce
Writer/Director: Darlene Johnson

PEST CONTROL
Feature Synopsis: When a city finds itself getting overrun with monsters our only hope of survival rests with an all-woman team of pest controllers.
Genre: Family Comedy
Producer: Jamie Hilton
Writer/Director: Christopher Weekes

RED EARTH
Genre: Drama Romance
Producers: Trish Lake, Dan Lake
Writer/Director: Liselle Mei
Feature Synopsis: Desperate to escape her arranged marriage, a frontier Chinese bride begins an erotic game with an English plantation owner, hoping to buy back her freedom.

STARFISH
Feature Synopsis: Georgia’s a sex-obsessed teenager whose plans for a wild week away with the girls are ruined by her best friend’s lamely perfect romance, which threatens to break up the group for good.
Genre: Comedy
Producer: Robin Geradts-Gill
Writers: Stephen Sholl, Hannah Moon, Robin Geradts-Gill
Director: Hannah Moon