Danielle Boesenberg.
With five shorts she has worked on screening this week at the Flickerfest International Short Film Festival screen editor Danielle Boesenberg must have a good shot at success at the festival.
She knew Ritual and Dust Devil were having their world premieres because she had a heads-up from the filmmakers. When the program came out she was pleasantly surprised to find Birdie, Black Lips and I F*cked A Mermaid and No One Believes Me were also selected.
“What I love about the five is they are all very different: two dramas, a comedy, a documentary and a queer film,” she tells IF.
After working on more than 30 shorts she is looking to take the next step into features and long-form TV dramas, noting: “It’s just a matter of finding the right project.”
Most ambitiously, she and her partner, screenwriter Sam Meikle, hope to co-direct a movie which would be a highly personal work stemming from the loss of family members.
Next week she will start work on St Augustine, a short from Birdie producer Lizzie Cater and writer-director Thomas Wilson-White. The protagonists are Harry and Davos, gay men in their late 20s who escape to St Augustine for a weekend. “It deals with identity and self-destruction and has elements of magic realism while ostensibly being a naturalistic drama,” she says.
After that she will edit music video ‘Far Away From Here,’ a ballad from US singer Liz Huett’s new album, directed by LA-based Aussie Jacobie Gray.
Gray directed The Aquarium, for which Danielle won the 2015 Australian Screen Editors award for best editing in a short film.
After graduating from the UNSW College of Fine Arts, majoring in media arts, she worked on TVCs before branching into light entertainment, cutting Dancing With the Stars and the World Comedy Tour.
She then did a graduate diploma in editing at AFTRS, where she connected with a number of directors who aim to get into features and TV dramas.
Asked how she decides which shorts to work on, she said: “Like audiences, I look for compelling stories with great characters. Also, the team is a big factor.”
Typically she spends three to four weeks in the editing rooms for each short. As shorts are notoriously cash-strapped she helps pay the bills by cutting branded content and corporate videos.
‘Dust Devil.’
Understandably she was chuffed when Shelly Lauman’s Birdie was selected for the Toronto International Film Festival and was then acquired by Fox Searchlight for US cinema release.
Among her works screening at Flickerfest, Robert Linsley’s Ritual is a psychological/supernatural thriller which revolves around the devout Devlin family. When their eldest daughter disappears from their remote farm, the local cop sent to investigate is disturbed by what he uncovers.
Poppy Walker’s documentary Dust Devil is set in a Death Valley ghost town where a dancer brings her gilded dream to life.
Madeleine Gottlieb’s comedy I F*cked A Mermaid and No One Believes Me centres on 15-year-old Gilligan, who is into epistolary novels and psychoanalysis. His mum has died and in an effort to connect with a son he doesn’t understand, his dad takes him on a crummy beachside holiday.
Adrian Chiarella’s Black Lips is a queer film about a lonely abalone trader who is awakened by a longing he’d never explored before.