Australian Zak Hilditch’s short film about a deadly pandemic and its impact on a father-daughter relationship has been selected for the Tribeca Film Festival (TFF).
Transmission – written and directed by Hilditch – is among 60 short films from 25 countries up for contention at the New York based event. The festival will mark the short film’s international premiere.
“It’s very exciting… it looks like we’re the only Australian film in there so it’s good to be flying the Aussie flag over in New York,” says Hilditch.
“We’re planning to shoot our feature in the second half of this year and going over to something like Tribeca with the short that helped us get the feature funded in the first place is a good way to cap it all off.”
Screen Australia supported production of Transmission via its Springboard program which aims to help filmmakers create a short to act as their calling card and compliment an existing feature film proposal.
The short film was made to support upcoming feature film These Final Hours, which secured a $750,000 injection from ScreenWest and funding from Screen Australia. The apocalyptic film follows a self-obsessed young man heading to a party on the last day on earth, but instead ends up saving the life of a young girl looking for her father.
“When we went through the Springboard program we had to identify elements in our feature that we needed to prove in a short film to eliminate risk with investors.
"Basically, for us, we need to convey a sense of a large scale world, we needed to convey a sense of heat and we needed to have an action sequence in there as well, so it was strange taking all those elements and trying to figure out what would be the best scenario to create a short around – sort of like working backwards – but overall the father-daughter relationship was something that we needed to get right as [the feature has] a sort of pseudo-father-daughter relationship as well."
These Final Hours will shoot later this year in and around Perth. Casting and crewing is currently underway.