Final feature greenlit for Film Lab round one

Adelaide Film Festival and South Australian Film Corporation (SAFC) are excited to announce the recipients of the first round of Film Lab funding.

The local creative team of writer Lucy Campbell, director Matt Vesely and producer Bettina Hamilton will now dive into producing and filming their sci-fi thriller Monolith. The film will then premiere at the 2022 Adelaide Film Festival, due to be held 19-30 October.

The team were one of three who have spent the last 11 months developing their scripts with the assistance of an experienced team of industry mentors. The remaining two teams of writer/director Peter Ninos and producer Georgia Humphreys, and writer/director Madeleine Parry and producer Peta Bulsara (Astbury) will now pitch their projects to independent financiers.

The team said: “We found the Film Lab: New Voices process incredibly rewarding, it provided project momentum we would never have achieved otherwise.  We are grateful to the mentors we’ve had throughout development, very proud of the script Lucy has written, and extremely excited for the opportunity to bring it to life to share with audiences this October.”

AFF's CEO and Creative Director Mat Kesting said: “An important remit of Adelaide Film Festival is to increase and stimulate innovative and new screen production in South Australia and to raise the profile of arts and screen culture in South Australia for audiences and practitioners. Film Lab: New Voices fulfills both of those missions and we are thrilled that this year’s Festival will present Monolith, the work of exciting new local cinematic voices.”

CEO of the South Australian Film Corporation Kate Croser said Film Lab: New Voices has produced three incredibly strong scripts from three innovative and ambitious creative teams. "South Australia has a proud history of globally successful, original and inventive low-budget filmmaking, and we are pleased to create opportunities which build on that legacy with a talented new generation.”

Co-funded by AFF and SAFC with in-kind support from Mercury CX and financial assistance from Screen Australia, Film Lab: New Voices is a low-budget feature film skills development initiative designed to provide a platform for the next generation of South Australian filmmaking talent.

In this first round of Film Lab: New Voices, at least one member of each filmmaking team (writer, director or producer) had to be from a group under-represented in the South Australian screen industry.

The second round of Film Lab: New Voices, opened in August, with the announcement of seven shortlisted teams earlier this month. The three successful teams will be announced in early March.