Episode #119 | Zak Hilditch

Welcome to this very different episode of the Cinema Australia Podcast. So, what’s so different about this episode? Well, it’s the first-ever Cinema Australia Podcast recording with a live audience. This episode was recorded during the recent WA Made Film Festival, where we invited friend-of-the-fest Zak Hilditch to join me and other punters for an interview about his career and his new film, We Bury the Dead. We Bury the Dead was filmed in Western Australia and follows Ava Newman (Daisy Ridley), a desperate woman searching for her husband in the aftermath of a catastrophic military experiment. Hoping to find him alive, Ava joins a "body retrieval unit," but her search takes a chilling turn when the corpses she's burying start showing signs of life. We Bury the Dead will celebrate its official world premiere at SXSW from March 9 to March 13. As the film isn’t officially out yet, and I missed it at the Adelaide Film Festival, most of this episode focuses on Zak’s career as a whole—which is hard not to admire. Following Zak’s Backyard Trilogy, a series of low-budget films he made in the early stages of his career, the filmmaker went on to make the cult classic These Final Hours here in Perth, followed by the Stephen King adaptation 1922 and his horror thriller Rattlesnake, both made for Netflix. Thank you to everyone who attended this session during the WA Made Film Festival. We hope to bring similar sessions to future festivals. Anyway… enjoy.