Short Australian film The Gift is a big hit worldwide

From The Herald-Sun (Australia): http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/short-australian-film-the-gift-is-a-big-hit-worldwide/story-fnilxh2p-1226671089673

Short Australian film The Gift is a big hit worldwide

Staff Writer
The Daily Telegraph
June 28, 2013 12:00AM

THE Gift is the little Aussie film that could.

The little-known independent local movie starring Hugo Weaving’s son, Harry Greenwood, is one of the hottest tickets on the international short-film circuit.

And it was made on a budget of less than $10,000, pretty much what we’d expect the cast and crew of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby to spend on lunch.

Created by brother and sister team Lloyd and Spencer Harvey, who have already won several awards for previous works, The Gift also stars Anne Tenney (The Castle and Always Greener), Mark Lee (Gallipoli), Hannah Marshall and Ben Mingay.

It tells the story of an 18-year-old boy, played by Greenwood, who is confined to a wheelchair with cerebral palsy and wants to lose his virginity on his 18th birthday.

“The Gift was extremely well received at the recent Palm Springs Short Film Festival,” Lloyd Harvey says.

Other respected international film festivals have heard the word, including two in LA which have added The Gift to their schedules.

The Melbourne International Film Festival early next month will also screen the celebrated short.

None of this means that the brother and sister team are suddenly flush with funds. However, according to Lloyd, critical acclaim on the short-film festival circuit means that, when the couple attempt to get a feature film produced, they’ll be taken seriously.

The Gift is certainly about an extremely sensitive area and Greenwood worked closely with the sex workers’ association The Scarlet Alliance and the Cerebral Palsy Alliance to ensure it sent the right message.

Autism & Aspergers in Popular Australian Cinema

Review of Autism & Aspergers in Popular Australian Cinema from Disability Studies Quarterly
Autism & Aspergers in Popular Australian Cinema Post 2000

Reviewed by Katie Ellis, Murdoch University

Australian Cinema is known for its tendency to feature bizarre and extraordinary characters that exist on the margins of mainstream society (O’Regan 1996, 261). While several theorists have noted the prevalence of disability within this national cinema (Ellis 2008; Duncan, Goggin & Newell 2005; Ferrier 2001), an investigation of characters that have autism is largely absent. Although characters may have displayed autistic tendencies or perpetuated misinformed media representations of this condition, it was unusual for Australian films to outright label a character as having autism until recent years. Somersault, The Black Balloon, and Mary & Max are three recent Australian films that explicitly introduce characters with autism or Asperger syndrome. Of the three, the last two depict autism with sensitivity, neither exploiting it for the purposes of the main character’s development nor turning it into a spectacle of compensatory super ability. The Black Balloon, in particular, demonstrates the importance of the intentions of the filmmaker in including disability among notions of a diverse Australian community.

Read More: http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1076/1252