ACMI Conversations: The Future According to Women Documentarians

This talk celebrated International Women’s Day with local filmmakers telling powerful and revealing stories. Filmmakers Sari Braithwaite, Chloe Brugale and Santilla Chingaipe were in conversation with Eloise Ross about their craft and processes, key collaborations and career pathways. About the speakers Santilla Chingaipe is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker. She spent nearly a decade working for SBS World News which saw her report from across Africa and interview some of the continent's most prominent leaders. Her work explores cultural identities, contemporary migration and politics. Last year she presented a one-off documentary for SBS, Date My Race. Santilla is currently directing and writing documentary on the complexities of Australia’s South Sudanese community. Her latest film, Black As Me, is a short documentary exploring the perception of beauty and race in Australia. She writes regularly for The Saturday Paper. Chloe Brugale is a screen practitioner with more than fifteen years' experience working across drama and factual productions, distribution, events and festival programming. As the General Manager of Robert Connolly’s company, Arenamedia, Chloe has contributed to many culturally and artistically innovative features, including The Turning, Spear and the box office hit Paper Planes. She also oversaw the successful release campaign of the documentary Chasing Asylum. Chloe’s producer credits include [CENSORED], an experimental documentary by director Sari Braithwaite, and Black As Me, a short film by director Santilla Chingaipe. Prior to Arenamedia, Chloe held positions at the Melbourne International Film Festival as Next Gen and Short Films programmer, the education department of the Cannes Film Festival and the avant-garde Utopia Cinemas in Avignon, France. Sari Braithwaite is a filmmaker who works across the disciplines of history and film. Her documentary films have played at MIFF, SFF, Adelaide Film Festival, Canberra Film Festival, Antenna Film Festival, and BFI London. She was a recipient of the 2015 AFTRS Creative Fellowship to create an experimental work about Australian censorship. In addition to her own practice, Sari has also worked as a professional researcher on a wide variety of film and television documentaries, and continues to work in universities as a researcher. Eloise Ross (host) is a writer, critic, and lecturer with a range of experience working with Melbourne film culture, both in organisational roles and as a qualified speaker. She has a PhD in cinema studies from La Trobe University and her research specialises in sound studies, Hollywood history, and the phenomenological experience of the cinema. Eloise has been widely published as a film critic, cultural commentator, and academic. She is a co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque, currently teaches in the film department at Swinburne University, is co-host of the Senses of Cinema podcast.