OzDox - The Australian Documentary Forum

27/10/2025

OZDOX recommends First Films, a film festival dedicated to introducing Sydney audiences to new daring debut works from emerging directors.
Now celebrating its fourth edition, First Films will take place from 5–9 November at The Golden Age Cinema Bar.

NEW WAVE
Saturday 8th November 2.15pm

Australian Premiere presented in honour of Paris Groovescooter

Receiving a Special Jury Mention for Best New Documentary Director at Tribeca 2024, Elizabeth Ai’s debut New Wave is a vivid exploration of her relationship with a Vietnamese music subculture. The film centres on her investigation of “new wave,” the popular 1980s musical phenomenon in the United States featuring Vietnamese artists and singers with big hairstyles, defiant attitudes, and joyful, infectious energy, a sound and style that shaped Ai’s own upbringing.
Ai reconnects with the movement’s icons, including Lynda Trang Đài, who has performed in Sydney, and Ian “DJ BPM” Nguyen, tracing how their creativity and fearless spirit influenced their lives and the community they built. Through intimate interviews, epic archival performances, and glimpses into everyday life, New Wave reveals the humour, audacity, and resilience of a generation that refused to be invisible. The film also reflects on Ai’s personal journey, intertwining family, music, and memory into a celebration of identity, art, and self-expression.
With introduction by Geroge Zuzak Groovescooter of Groovescooter.

Special Jury Mention for Best New Documentary Director at Tribeca 2024, Elizabeth Ai’s debut is a vivid exploration of her Vietnamese music culture.

27/10/2025

OZDOX recommends First Films, a film festival dedicated to introducing Sydney audiences to new daring debut works from emerging directors.
Now celebrating its fourth edition, First Films will take place from 5–9 November at The Golden Age Cinema.

DEBUT, OR, OBJECTS OF THE FIELD OF DEBRIS AS CURRENTLY CATALOGUED
Saturday 8th November 12pm

Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued is an intimate, hypnotic, playful, deliciously witty and entirely unforgettable film about the inner workings of a director. The film follows Julian, a young filmmaker who discovers a strange book connected to a vanished art forger and becomes convinced he has found the subject of his next project. As he begins to investigate, the story he is telling starts to fold back on itself. Clues appear where they should not, and the line between his film and his life begins to dissolve into a hybrid documentary that plays with form, truth and story.
Premiering at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and screening at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight and the Los Angeles Festival of Movies, this feature made on a mere $900 budget, filmed almost entirely in director Julian Castronovo’s bedroom, glows with an uncanny, dreamlike and raw texture. Every image feels unearthed from a forgotten archive, full of flicker, shadow, and quiet revelation. A rare cinematic event, a handmade film that transforms limitation into an internet fuelled visual cultural mash-up.
Preceded by Noise (8mins), a short film by Julian Castronovo.

An intimate, hypnotic, playful, deliciously witty and entirely unforgettable film about the inner workings of a director.

21/05/2025

Changes to Screen Australia funding programs announced.

Screen Australia has today announced its Documentary Funding Programs and guidelines are evolving to better align with industry needs and support screen practitioners.

14/03/2025

Part of the Cinema Reborn festival of newly restored films at the Randwick Ritz and Melbourne Lido is the powerful documentary, HOW THE WEST WAS LOST (87mins 1987), directed by David Noakes. Screening with BREAD AND DRIPPING (16 mins 1981) by Vic Smith, Margot Nash, Elizabeth Schaffer, Wendy Brady and Donna Foster.

On 1 May 1946, 800 Aboriginal station workers walked off sheep stations in the north-west of Western Australia, marking the beginning of a carefully organised strike that was to last for at least three years, but never officially ended.

14/03/2025

CINEMA REBORN - 30 April to 26 May at the Ritz Randwick, is a wide-ranging program of newly restored films.

On Sunday 4th May 12.15pm, Director RIVKA HARTMAN will introduce her doco, THE MINISKIRTED DYNAMO (55 mins, 1996), showing with Lee Whitmore's ON A FULL MOON (17 mins, 1997).
“Dora emerges as a fascinating character…a very personal piece of film-making” – David Stratton
Rivka Hartman’s The Miniskirted Dynamo focuses on her mother, Dr Dora Bialestock, an extraordinary figure in Melbourne’s medical community. Dora studied Medicine at the University of Melbourne and published widely on her specialist research subjects. She became a figure of some controversy when she attacked the state government’s management of children in care. She was a public thorn in many sides of government. Hartman’s film is a remarkable autobiographical and biographical documentary about the intense and tangled relationship between the filmmaker and her mother, both of whom had ambitions and goals that did not mix well.

https://www.ritzcinemas.com.au/.../the-mini-skirted...

06/03/2025

https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/sa/media-centre/news/2025/02-27-2-million-for-8-documentaries

Screen Australia has announced support for eight documentaries that will share in $2.3 million of direct production funding.