Cover Image: Stills from the four finalists competing for the 2025 CinefestOZ Film Prize: We Bury the Dead, Birthright, One More Shotand Songs Inside.

The boom in Western Australian screen industry is reflected in the line-up for this year’s CinefestOz Film Festival, with two locally made features competing for the $100,000 Film Prize and a bumper line-up of local participants.

Leading the WA tilt is We Bury the Dead, Zak Hilditch’s zombie-horror thriller about an American woman (Daisy Ridley) who travels to Tasmania in search of her husband amidst a population who have been transformed into the walking dead by an experimental weapon of mass destruction.

Hilditch, whose feature These Final Hours (2014) played in the Director’s Fortnight of the Cannes Film Festival, has been working at international level for the past decade (1922, Rattlesnake) so he will be tough to beat in the fight for the $100,000 prize.

Hilditch’s local challenger is Zoe Pepper, whose feature debut Birthright is about a jobless millennial (Travis Jeffrey) and his pregnant wife (Maria Angelico) who are forced to move back into the home of his wealthy but mean-spirited parents (Michael Hurst, Linda Cropper), triggering a cross-generational battle that gets increasingly dark and desperate. The housing crisis gripping the country should win Birthright brownie points with the judges.

Up against Hilditch and Pepper is a Shalom Arnold’s Songs Inside, a documentary about a group of incarcerated women inside an Adelaide correction facility who sign up to learn and instrument and write their own songs as part of a music program designed to give them a sense of self-worth and help overcome trauma, and the time-travel rom-com One More Shot starring Emily Browning.

While the Film Prize gets the bulk of the attention, which makes sense as it is one of the world’s biggest, outside of the competition there is a strong line-up of WA-made features, television programs and shorts to ensure good crowds at this 18th installment of CinefestOZ, which takes place in Busselton and Margaret River and the wine country in between from August 30 to September 7.

Of major interest will be a screening of episodes of Tales from Outer Suburbia, an ABC series adapted from the beloved picture book by celebrated Western Australian author Shaun Tan.

Festival-goers will also get the chance for an early glimpse of the new episodes of the Kimberley-set Mystery Road: Origin, the acclaimed series spun off from Ivan Sen’s 2013 neo-Western, with Mark Coles-Smith taking over the role of Jay Swan, the indigenous detective who grapples with family issues while tracking down bad guys. 

It will also be interesting to finally get to see Dawn Jackson’s long-in-the-making documentary Pointe: Dancing on the Knife’s Edge, which tells the story of the dancer Floeur Alder (daughter of ballet luminaries Lucette and Alan Alder) who at the age of 22 and about to embark on a European tour was brutally stabbed. 

Dancer-turned-filmmaker Jackson has been close to both Alder and her parents since studying dance at WAAPA in the 1980s, so she is telling the story from a unique perspective.

“Floeur recovered physically quite quickly but it was the struggle to overcome the emotional, psychological and spiritual trauma that made me want to tell her story,” Jackson told Seesaw in 2021 when she opened up about her own struggle to make her documentary.

“The way we look at trauma today is totally different than we did 20 years ago. Back then victims of crime were given a little bit of counselling then basically left to their own devices,” said Jackson. 

“Now we know a lot more about post-traumatic stress disorder and the many triggers that can send someone back to that moment of horror. The body heals but a lot more has to happen for the soul to recover.”

“This year’s festival is all about connection — between people, places and experiences — and is something I think we can all relate to in 2025,” said CinefestOZ CEO Cassandra Jordan, who launched this year’s event recently at the Camelot Arts Club in Mosman Park.

“With that theme in mind, we have created more great value events where festival-goers can meet and hear from filmmakers, and enjoy fabulous food, wine and conversations.

“Along with plenty of comedy, drama, horror, sci-fi and feel-good family films, 2025 is also a big year for thought-provoking and inspirational real-life stories, with our biggest selection of documentaries ever.”

One of the most interesting strands of CinefestOZ is the Industry Program, which each year draws major figures from across Australia and the globe and allows local screen practitioners to connect with the heavyweights.

With the imminent arrival of the Perth Film Studios this world-class facility will undoubtedly be a focus of CinefestOZ’s Industry Program, which will no doubt feature sessions involving the studio’s first CEO  Tom Avison, who has come from London with a big reputation.

The local industry won’t get much of a look in at the new studio, whose aim is to attract major national and international film and television productions, but there will be many opportunities for Perth practitioners to engage with the facility. 

No doubt there will be lots of questions and conversations at this year’s CinefestOZ. Watch this space for more details as they come to hand.

CinefestOz Film Festival is on from August 30 to September 7.
For more information, visit: https://cinefestoz.com