Best Aus Shorts
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
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.