The winning team
Mick Brodercik
Two Western Australian filmmakers, Andrew Ewing and Jennifer Jamieson, have recently consolidated their position as emerging film talents by securing one of 3 Filmex short film production grants provided by Screenwest. The $62,000 grant will enable writer-director Ewing and producer Jamieson to realise their short drama Automatic, a detailed character study of the relationship between a husband and wife who are challenged by past and present trauma. The pair make a formidable creative team and have previously collaborated on various projects. Both teach screen production and photography at Murdoch University and reflect the strength of the developing inter-campus Screen Academy initiative, which fosters postgraduate filmmaking in WA.
Jamieson has already amassed an impressive list of awards here and overseas. Her short film Soon has screened at several local and international festivals including JVC Tokyo Video Festival (Japan), the European Media Arts Festival (Germany) and Jaffas Down the Aisle (Melbourne). Soon, an evocative meditation on memory and motherhood, has won a number of awards including Best Director, Best Editing and The Kaleidoscope Award at the MetroScreen Kaleidoscope, best film at the SPLIF/ Artrage Festival and the Communication Prize at the Tokyo Video Festival. A recent visit to an international film festival as an invited guest surprised and delighted Jamieson who was unprepared for the passion and corresponding commercial viability the short film scene can generate overseas.
Jamieson is completing her Honours degree at Murdoch University and continues to collaborate with local filmmakers, having worked on, among others, the award winning productions Marama, Resonance and Gaze. Similarly, Ewing is undertaking a higher degree (a screen production PhD at Murdoch). His short film Resonance was awarded Best Narrative Video at the 2002 National Student Film and Video Festival in Sydney and nominated for Best Short Drama at the 2002 WA Screen Awards (WASAs). Resonance was his 4th film as writer, director and cinematographer and stylishly examines Gen X ennui, alienation and the politics of one night stands. His first film, Smile, won the WA Screen Award for Best Experimental film in 1998 and his follow up works, Violence and Capsule, are both screening at numerous national festivals.
Skilled in most areas of film production, Ewing has served as cinematographer on several short films including Tim Holland’s The Malefactor and Sweeper, Jamieson’s Soon and among others, Perplexity and Fade directed by Melbourne based writer/director Stuart Moffat. He has worked on numerous music videos for local Perth bands such as Gata Negra, Headshot and El Horizonte and on the weekends Ewing assumes an alternate identity as a musician, performing on stage in local pubs and nightclubs with his band Thumb.
RealTime issue #57 Oct-Nov 2003 pg. 18
