WA-shot films We Bury The Dead and Birthright will go up against South Australian documentary Songs Inside and Victorian time travel comedy One More Shot for this year’s $100,000 CinefestOZ Film Prize.
Held August 30 to September 7, this year’s CinefestOZ will include the usual mix of screenings, filmmaker Q&As, afterparties, and InConversation dining events, with the CinefestOZ Prize winner to be announced on Saturday, September 6.
Coming in from New York is Zoe Pepper’s Birthright, which had its world premiere as part of last month’s Tribeca Film Festival.
A 2022 recipient of Screenwest’s West Coast Visions initiative, the film stars Travis Jeffery and Maria Angelico as Cory and Jasmine, a professional couple preparing to welcome their first child. When Cory loses his job, they are forced to move back in with his retiree parents, played by Linda Cropper and Michael Hurst, until they get back on their feet. As their stay extends, Cory fixates on his parents’ wealth and decides the only way to achieve the success he always imagined is to do something unimaginable.
Written and directed by Pepper, Birthright was produced by Rush Films’ Cody Greenwood, who worked alongside co-producer Kate Neylon, and executive producers John Maynard, John Battsek, and Sarah Thomson.
The other WA hope in the field is Zak Hilditch’s We Bury The Dead, which was shot across Albany and the Great Southern Region at the beginning of last year. The survival thriller stars Daisy Ridley as Ava, a desperate woman whose husband is missing in the aftermath of a catastrophic military experiment. Hoping to find him alive, Ava joins a ‘body retrieval unit’, but her search takes a chilling turn when the corpses she’s burying start showing signs of life. The cast also includes Mark Coles Smith and Brenton Thwaites. Kelvin Munro and Grant Sputore of WA production company The Penguin Empire produced the film alongside Ross Dinerstein of Campfire Studios in the US.
It was joined at this year’s SXSW by Nicholas Clifford’s One More Shot, a Stan Original romcom that features Emily Browning as a party goer who discovers a bottle of time-travelling tequila at a 1999 New Year’s Eve bash. Each shot takes her back to the start of the night, giving her a bottle’s worth of chances to change the course of the evening and make her ex-boyfriend Joe fall back in love with her before the stroke of midnight. Alice Foulcher and Gregory Erdstein wrote the script, with Virginia Whitwell and Nick Batzias producing for GoodThing Productions, alongside Truce Films’ Jim Wright and Elise Trenorden. The film will have its Australian premiere at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival.
Rounding out the field is Shalom Almond’s Songs Inside, a documentary about First Nations singer and songwriter Nancy Bates as she leads a music program within the prison in preparation for a performance with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. The film won the $20,000 Documentary Australia Award at the Sydney Film Festival and the Feature Documentary Audience Award at last year’s Adelaide Film Festival, where it premiered.
Speaking about this year’s finalists, CinefestOZ Board chair Margaret Buswell said each of the films showcased distinctive Australian stories brought to life through “clever and compelling storytelling and exceptional talent, both in front of and behind the camera”.
“We are delighted that these standout films will have their WA premiere at CinefestOZ, where audiences can enjoy them alongside visiting film talent and the official Film Prize Jury,” she said.
“The 2025 $100000 Film Prize winner will then be announced during the spectacular Film Prize Celebration on Saturday, September 6.”
The full festival program will be unveiled on July 17. Early bird tickets are now available from the website.