MAKING, WRITING, DOING: WOMEN GETTING A START IN SCREEN CULTURE
AMIE BATALIBASI
Amie Batalibasi is a writer, director and producer. Her creative practice is driven by a passion to collaborate with diverse communities at a grassroots level, to unearth stories that have the possibility to spark empowerment and create change. She has written and directed award winning short films that have been screened at festivals in Australia and internationally. Amie is the 2017 recipient of the Sundance Institute Merata Mita Fellowship through which she will receive support and mentorship to develop the feature adaptation of her award-winning short film, Blackbird. The story explores the little-known history of Australia’s sugar slaves by shining a light on the dark history of “blackbirding,” where from 1863-1904 approximately 60,000 Pacific Islanders were taken, often by kidnapping and coercion, to labor on the country’s sugar cane and cotton farms.
Over the last nine years, as mentor and media trainer, Batalibasi has produced dozens of short films by first-time filmmakers through collaborative community projects with children and young people, new migrant groups, remote Indigenous communities, and culturally and linguistically diverse communities in and around Melbourne, interstate Australia and in the Solomon Islands.
NYAWUDA CHUOL
Nyawuda Chuol is the eldest child of six children. Hard working individual and always strive to see through what she has begun. She resides with her family in Australia. Nyawuda graduated high school in Australia in 2009 and went on to university the following year to study medicine while pursuing acting on the side. In 2012 she realised medicine was not her true calling. She packed her bags and headed for acting school on the Gold Coast. Nyawuda graduated from a two year intensive acting program at the New York Film Academy, Australia with a 3 week scholarship at the New York Film Academy Los Angeles. After learning an incredible amount about herself and honing her acting craft, she is now committed to pursuing her dreams of a successful acting career.
Cerise howard
Cerise Howard is the Artistic Director of the Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australia and a committee member of both the Melbourne Cinémathèque and tilde: Melbourne Trans and Gender Diverse Film Festival. A film critic on 3RRR's “Plato's Cave”, she has often written for Senses of Cinema and other film journals, as well as The Age, The Big Issue, and Melbourne’s queer street press. She has participated in critics' juries at international film festivals in Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Ukraine, and has been a juror at the Mezipatra Queer Film Festival in Prague and the Human Rights Arts and Film Festival in Melbourne.
A perpetual plotter and schemestress, Cerise has read at Melbourne's “Women of Letters” literary salon and is the bassist in The Homo sapiens, Yana Alana's band for her forthcoming "Queen Kong" shows.
Nora niasari
Born in Iran, Nora is a writer/director based in Melbourne. In 2010, she obtained a Bachelor Degree in Architecture from the University of Technology, Sydney where she started making short films. In 2011, her documentary BEIRUT, UNDER THE BRIDGE was awarded ‘Best Director Documentary’ and ‘Special Jury Prize Documentary’ at the 11th Beirut International Film Festival and broadcast on CNN. In 2012, Nora fulfilled an internship with Emmy Award Winning Director Sonya Pemberton on the feature length documentary Jabbed: Love, Fear & Vaccines.
In 2014, she completed the Masters in Film and Television at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) in narrative filmmaking. Her graduate film The Phoenix (Simorgh) premiered at the 64th Melbourne International Film Festival where Nora participated in the 2015 MIFF Accelerator program for emerging Australian directors. In February 2015, Nora was one of 50 filmmakers selected for the Abbas Kiarostami filmmaking workshop in Barcelona. Her short film High Tide was selected in the top 10 films to screen at international film festivals.
In 2016, Nora completed a funded Screen Australia/ADG Director’s Attachment with Emma Freeman on the Matchbox Pictures/FOXTEL TV series Secret City. Nora recently completed a short film titled WATERFALL funded by Screen Australia’s 2015 Hot Shots Program. In 2017, Nora will be travelling to Mexico with the support of the Ian Potter Cultural Trust to fulfil a director’s attachment with Cannes and Venice Award winning writer/director Michael Rowe.
Panel Moderator:
Vyshnavee Wijekumar
Vyshnavee Wijekumar is an established marketing and communications professional of Sri Lankan heritage with expansive experience across the Australian film and television sector. She is a massive proponent of amplifying the works of culturally and lingustically diverse voices across the film, television and cultural sector and was most recently on the steering committee for Screen Australia's Seeing Ourselves event. Aside from evenings spent binge-watching Gilmore Girls on Netflix, she is currently the Marketing & Partnerships Director of the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival.