The Village Roadshow Prize for Screen Writing: Shortlist 2003

Judges report

While in 2002, the inaugural year of this prize, only scripts by Victorian writers were eligible for entry, the criteria were expanded this year to enable writers from anywhere in Australia to participate. There were 26 entries with scripts being submitted from South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria. Writing for television figured prominently once again in the form of series, mini-series, telemovies and children's drama. Feature films were almost matched in number by 50-minute dramas, their diverse forms and themes ranging from broad, almost absurdist comedy to intense, intimate dramas of loss, grief and tragedy. More so than last year, contemporary political debates, particularly regarding immigration and refugees, were a central theme of several scripts, or were reflected more obliquely in studies of difference and otherness.

The judges were unanimous in a challenging year where there were fine projects in contention. Particularly impressive, for example, was Alison Tilson's delicate study of an accidental relationship in Japanese Story, and Gary McCaffrie and Shaun Micallef's compelling police thriller, Black Jack.

Shortlist

Alexandra's Project by Rolf de Heer (Fandango Australia/Vertigo Productions)
Rolf de Heer's Alexandra's Project is a brooding, minimalist thriller, an uncompromising account of a marriage gone wrong. There is a sense of ever-present danger. Dramatic shifts occur, each reveal charting a new and ever darker step in the dangerous psychological game being played by Alexandra, the wife in this dysfunctional marriage. With its use of closed-circuit video, the claustrophobic environment of the house and its home security devices suddenly turned inwards to prevent the occupant from escaping, rather than intruders from breaking in, the script plays with the idea of reversals. Alexandra felt that Steve had trapped her with his predatory sexual behaviour and control of their money. She now lays a trap for him in the home where she was trapped. The game she plays with Steve is the game the filmmaker is playing with the audience. In this very adult tale, we are being toyed with, our voyeurism piqued and mocked in the same way as Steve's. This is a screenplay which reveals a writer in full command of the medium.

Marking Time by John Doyle (Southern Star Entertainment)
John Doyle's Marking Time is a four-part mini series set in a country town, a coming-of-age story of Hal - short for Halifax - who has just finished high school and is taking the obligatory year off before going to University. It is as much about Hal, whose witty and energetic voice-over creates a telling counterpoint to the story as it unfolds, and his love for Randa, the daughter of an Afghan refugee, as it is about attitudes and political values in Australia from the period just preceding the Olympic Games in Sydney, up until the present day. Its fusion of real events with fiction and its cutting back and forth across the time frame create an intricate tale. It is at once intimate and panoramic in scope. While highly political, it avoids didacticism and cliche, whether in weaving the political conflicts into the characters' lives or in capturing the complexities of life in rural Australia. There is a depth of compassion and understanding of all the characters' motivations, no matter how misguided or even reprehensible, they might be. Above all, there is humour. This is a screenplay of great seriousness which addresses itself directly to themes such as racism, social upheaval, rural poverty, among others, with a light touch and bracing hilarity and candour.

Love Letters from a War by Wain Fimeri (ABC)
This is a love story of heartbreaking intensity. A docu-drama drawn largely from letters exchanged during World War II by John and Josie Johnson, the screenplay traces the lives of this couple who meet, fall deeply in love and are devoted to each other and their eight children, but who are then separated by war when John joins the army and finds himself at Tobruk. The letters are their only link, often taking months to arrive. It is not only the family which is vividly recreated here, the screenplay captures time and place in the minutiae of rural and domestic life and John's experiences in the army. The letters are candid, full of feeling, humour and incidental detail, but it is Wain Fimeri's command of story-telling that draws them together to create an absorbing narrative that is passionate while never descending into mawkishness or sentimentality. It is about war and its impact: love, loss and grief experienced at a deeply personal level, as well as at the level of a community, and a country still in the process of finding an identity. It is both a celebration and a work of mourning.