Adelaide Film Festival’s HIVE Fund commissions two new films
At the opening night of the Adelaide Film Festival last night, South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill unveiled two new film projects commissioned by the HIVE Fund. The fund is an initiative of the Adelaide Film Festival in partnership with the Australia Council for the Arts, Screen Australia and ABC Arts, and supports screen-based projects from Australian artists and film-makers.
In its second year, the fund will support two projects, the first from indigenous director/choreographer Stephen Page, director of the Bangarra Dance Theatre. With producers Robert Connolly and John Harvey, Page will bring to the big screen an adaptation of his dance theatre piece, Spear. Page and Connolly previously worked together Tim Winton’s The Turning producing a dance based chapter in the film.
The second project comes from theatre director Rosemary Myer and is titled Girl Asleep. Girl Asleep forms the third work in a trilogy of rites-of-passage stories by writer and director team Matthew Whittet and Rosemary Myers which have been performed at Adelaide’s Windmill Theatre.
Both film projects will go into production in 2014 and will premiere at the 2015 Adelaide Film Festival, and will also be seen on ABC Television.
The opening night of the festival also saw director and writer Scott Hicks awarded with the Don Dunstan award for his contribution to cinema.
The opening night film was the Australian premiere of Tracks. Directed by John Curran and produced by Emile Sherman and Ian Canning’s See Saw Films, the film tells the story of Robyn Davidson, an Australian woman who treked 1,700 miles with three camels across Western Australia. While it was the first time the film has screened in Australia, it was well received at the Venice, Toronto and Telluride film festivals earlier this year.
