PRESS RELEASE
South by Southwest Sydney® (SXSW Sydney) announced the Screen Award winners from the 2024 Screen Festival presented by IHG Hotels & Resorts, with super-8 shot, Australian feature A Grand Mockery taking home the coveted award for Best Feature Film.
Directed by Samuel Dixon and Adam C. Briggs, A Grand Mockery follows Josie (Dixon) who leads a life of passive mundane displeasure before his psychic ills deform him and see him roaming the rainforest hinterlands of Queensland. A Grand Mockery is simultaneously singular and a flashback to underground filmmaking before it became codified. Filmed on soft luminous super-8, tonally playful and structured as a diptych, A Grand Mockery begins as a work of morbid comic realism before the film transforms along with Josie.
The SXSW Sydney 2024 Audience Award went to Pools, the debut feature film of Sam Hayes. Starring a raft of rising stars including Odessa A’zion (recently cast opposite Timothée Chalamet in A24’s Marty Supreme) and Mason Gooding (Scream VI, Love, Victor) alongside Modern Family’s Ariel Winter, Pools follows Kennedy (A’zion), who is stuck at summer school after flunking her sophomore year of college. Amidst a heat wave, she rallies a ragtag crew for a pool-hopping adventure through the wealthy estates of Lake Forest, on the north shore of Chicago. But as the secrets spill, a wild night of fun becomes a cathartic journey of self-discovery.
Stan Original Series Thou Shalt Not Steal, from visionary director Dylan Rivers, was awarded Best Episodic. An eight-episode road series set in Central and South Australia in the 1980s, Thou Shalt Not Stealfollows Robyn (Sherry-Lee Watson), a young Aboriginal delinquent, who, on a search to find the truth behind a family secret, escapes from detention and reluctantly teams up with awkward teenager Gidge (Will McDonald). Together they flee her small central desert community on a perilous journey across the outback, finding answers and learning some hard life lessons along the way. Hot on their heels are Maxine (Miranda Otto), a sex worker whose taxi Robyn stole, and Gidge’s domineering father Robert (Noah Taylor), a fraudulent preacher.
The award for Best Short Film was tied between Fishtank (dir. Wendi Tang, China/USA) and Try to Remember, Please (dir. Maria Dudko, Australia). In Fishtank, Jules (Tiffany Chu) has been sober for a year but can’t stop vomiting goldfish. Striving to put her life back on track, she must preserve control when a fish enthusiast unexpectedly enters her life. Try to Remember, Please offers a visceral first-person account of how violence is erased from memory, and how that can be weaponized by those trying to contest its very existence.
Best Music Video was awarded to Psychedelic Porn Crumpets’ Pillhouse, directed by Ollie Jones (United Kingdom).
Ruby and Tom Take a Cake to a Wedding took home the award for Best Student Film, directed by Australian filmmaker Jack McTaggart. The short follows determined and aspiring cake-maker Ruby and her aloof partner Tom, who must deliver a wedding cake out of town, forcing them to rely on their family and friends who consistently can’t seem to spare a second thought to anything beyond their own self-involved lives.
The 2024 Screen Festival presented by IHG Hotels & Resorts closed on Sunday 20 October with Two Hands: A Live Script Read, hosted by comedy sweethearts and cinephiles Alexei Toliopoulos (The Last Video Store podcast, Finding Yeezus) and comedian Gen Fricker (Have You Been Paying Attention?, triple j). In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the beloved Aussie comedy/crime film, Toliopoulos and Fricker were joined on stage by a line-up of Australia’s favourite comedy performers including Susoe Youssef, Clare Cavanagh, Danielle Walker, Dave Woodhead, Ella Lawry and Zach Ruane.
SXSW Sydney is delivered in partnership with the NSW Government through its tourism and major events agency, Destination NSW. Plan your SXSW Sydney 2024 trip now, visit sydney.com.
