Adam Elliot's long-awaited debut feature Mary and Max has screened and the first reviews are in, with critics describing it as a high-end claymation drama with strong doses of humor and quirkiness.
The Funk, written and directed by Cris Jones and produced by Melanie Coombs has picked up the International Jury Award at Short Cuts Cologne.
Shorts director Cris Jones will make his feature debut on The Death and Life of Otto Bloom.
Academy Award winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote) has joined an all-star line-up of Australian talent in lending his exceptional talent to voice the role of Max in the new claymation feature Mary and Max.
Warwick Thornton, Rachael Perkins, Craig Gillespie, Elizabeth Debicki and producers Bridget Ikin and Melanie Coombs are among the 928 screen practitioners who have been invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Xavier Samuel, Miranda Otto and Sam Neill are attached to star in Midnight in Byzantium, a mystery/adventure about a young guy who is trapped in a remote town where nothing - and no one - is as it seems.
For Melanie Coombs, producer of 'Mary and Max' and Oscar-winning short 'Harvie Krumpet', stop-motion animation has a magical quality - at once real, but not real - that touches audiences profoundly.
She was one of the first people approached by the filmmakers behind a documentary about her grandfather and the poet Judith Wright