BEST AUS SHORTS: SESSION 1

The Best Australian Short Documentary Competition highlights the best documentary short films from across the country with a runtime of 30 minutes or less. Antenna has partnered with the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) to offer the winning filmmaker a cash prize of $5,000 as development funding for their next project.

ENEMY ALIEN

Gabriel Murphy | 2022 | 13 min | Premiere

Joseph Murakami was a fourteen-year-old Australian citizen from Darwin when the Second World War reached the Pacific and he was interned by the Australian government on the basis of his Japanese ethnicity. 

THE GARDENS

Giles Fielke, Paddy Hay | 2022 | 7 min | Premiere

Beautifully photographed on expired 16mm film, Hay and Fielke have crafted a dreamy, melancholic time capsule of Collingwood Community Gardens in a state of neglect after it was closed to local gardeners in 2021, during the Melbourne lockdowns. 

MADE OF LIGHT

Yannick Jamey | 2022 | 14 min | Premiere

In this philosophical portrait, we meet Danish ex-patriot Ole Jakob Nielsen, who has cultivated the unlikely practice of sculpting wood into lamps, on the visually stunning and famously treeless Faroe Islands. 

TEDDY

Brett D’Souza | 2022 | 6 min | Premiere

Teddy shares memories of growing up in the first Aboriginal household in Brunswick - where he continues to live today - having moved there with his mother, Kamilaroi Elder and rights activist Aunty Jan Chessells, in 1974. 

VANITAS

Steven Andrew McIntyre, Glenn D’Cruz | 2022 | 27 min | Premiere

Vanitas is a son’s belated eulogy to his late Anglo-Indian father, whose modest aspirations were crushed by ill-health, racism and bad luck. A singular life is shaped by historical, political and social currents.

MY BA

Alice Xiaohua Yang | 2022 | 8 min | Premiere

A daughter introduces us to her charmingly eccentric Chinese migrant father. Whilst working as a handyman, he preoccupies himself with overzealous investments he believes will one day make him rich.