AUDIENCE AWARDS 2020

Director Alana Hicks' comedy drama 'Chicken' won Australian Short Film Today's Virtual Audience Award following our program's first-ever virtual screening, with 'Wine Lake', directed by Platon Theodoris and starring Writer and Executive Producer Ailís Logan winning the Runner Up Award.

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After the screening, there was a Q&A with the makers of three of the films conducted by Australian International Screen Forum Chairman Chris Beale.

 

One of the filmmakers was Hicks. She is an experienced digital series writer and producer. 'Chicken' is the first film she received a grant to make. Hicks was born in Papua New Guinea to a White Australian father and an Indigenous PNG mother. She came to Australia when she was 6; her mother came to Australia more recently.

 

Hicks' short film deals with racism, although it does so in a soft comedic way. She was asked why she made that choice and didn’t take a harder approach. She replied that she has a background in comedy and through comedy she wanted to tell the story of the excitable mother — a recent immigrant to Australia — and the calm and slightly exasperated daughter — a much earlier immigrant and now comfortable in Australia — who has to go to the rescue of a mother who can’t deal with many day to day situations. She confirmed that the characters are based on her and her mother.

 

Hicks was asked about an online story she wrote — Smoke and Fire — dealing with violence against women in Papua New Guinea, driven by superstition. She wrote about her mother’s brutal experience, and about Hick’s growing up as a mixed-raced kid. She was asked about how that has driven her approach to her art. She said it has been central to her mission to tell her mother’s story and of her mother’s suffering in PNG. "In many ways I understood fairly early on that I had it much easier than [my mother] did... I appreciated how difficult it was for her, and I resented how easy it was for me."

 

Another participant in the Q&A was Melissa Anastasia, the director of 'Sleepwalking.' She was asked what drew her to the tough subject of an abusive husband/stepfather and the impact the abuse had on his wife and her 11-year old son. She spoke about how she has focused on abusive relationships in her work and how hard it is for women to leave those relationships and how the abuse can become intergenerational.

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'Wine Lake''s Platon Theodoris and Ailís Logan also participated in the Q&A, where they discussed, among other topics, the difficulty Logan had navigating the world while in costume as a homeless woman. This is the third award 'Wine Lake' has picked up as part of our 2020 program, having also won the Audience Award in St. Tropez as well as the Nicolas Baudin prize for best short film.