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Short films Two Sands and In Australia have snared the lion’s share of nominations for the Wa Screen Culture Awards, recognised across both the innovation and outstanding achievement award categories.

Now in its second year, the WASCAs are presented and produced by the Revelation Perth International Film Festival, in collaboration with the Wa screen industry, to recognise new, established, and emerging screen practitioners across a variety of disciplines.

Of this year’s nominees, Poppy van Oorde-Grainger’s Two Sands is the most represented with eight nods, while Miley Tunnecliffe’s In Australia has seven.

There is also good news for Rush Films, with Gracie Otto’s Under the Volcano, Frances Elliott and Samantha Marlow’s Girl Like You, and Jacqueline Pelczar’s Sparkles all scoring multiple nominations.

Revelation Film Festival director Richard Sowada said he couldn’t wait to reveal the deliberations of the 36 screen professionals that make up the jury for the awards.

Sydney Film Festival has announced the films to compete for the Documentary Australia Foundation (Daf) Award for Australian Documentary, with a 12-strong line-up to mark the prize’s 12th anniversary.

The winning film will be presented with $10,000 at the festival’s closing night in November.

All docs were selected for the festival’s original August date, but the move to later in the year means a number of the films, such as Sbs’s Australia Uncovered projects Strong Female Lead, The Bowraville Murders, The Department and Incarceration Nation, will have broadcast already. Others, like Gracie Otto’s Under the Volcano, are in digital release.

Its a challenge for the festival to grapple with, but given the disrupted nature of this year, it may still be first chance for many of the filmmakers to have their work screen in front of a live audience.

And, notably, there is still a world...

US producer Alan Poul will be the industry guest speaker for this month’s CinefestOZ Industry Program.

Poul’s producing and directing credits include Netflix’s The Eddy, and Tales of the City, BBC’s MotherFatherSon, as well as HBO’s Westworld, The Newsroom, and Six Feet Under.

He has also directed episodes of HBO’s Rome, and Big Love, as well as Netflix’s Grace and Frankie, and the pilots for the TNT series Perception.

The Emmy and Golden Globe-winning producer is in the midst of executive producing the upcoming HBO Max series Tokyo Vice at Endeavour Content, where his company Boku Films is based.

Poul, whose appearance will be presented via the American Film Showcase, will be joined by local, national, and international guests in the two-day program, which incorporates 10 sessions across August 26-27.

Available online and in-person, the discussions are set to address the contemporary challenges faced...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

The Hottest August (Brett Story)

Where better than New York City to make a structuralist film? Cities are iterative, their street grids diagrams of theme and variation, and New York most of all—with its streets and avenues named for numbers and letters and states and cities and presidents and Revolutionary War generals spanning an archipelago, intersecting at a million little data points at which to measure class, race, culture, history, architecture and infrastructure. And time, too—from this human density emerge daily and seasonal rituals, a set of biorhythms, reliable as the earth’s, against which to mark gradual shifts and momentary fashions. Summer is for lounging on fire escapes, always, and, today, for Mister Softee. Yesterday it was shaved ice.

In putting together this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival (Miff), director Al Cossar was “hoping for the best and planning for utter chaos”.

Miff’s 69th edition had always been devised as a hybrid model, but originally films were to run in cinemas for the first half of the festival and online for the second.

With Melbourne just emerging from its fifth lockdown, the festival announced today it will now bring forward the online program to run for the full duration of the festival, August 5-22, while in-cinema screenings will now commence later, on August 12.

There is the hope by that date, the capacity restrictions that Victorian cinemas are facing (currently capped at 100 per theatre) may have loosened. All ticket holders who have already purchased tickets to events will be contacted directly.

While the festival has had to make these changes, Cossar tells If the 2021 event was always designed...

Director and producer Nadia Tass will chair the jury for this year’s CinefestOZ, which had its full line-up announced in Perth yesterday.

The filmmaker will helm voting on the $100,000 CinefestOZ prize, adjudicating in-competition finalists Here Out West, Nitram, River, and The Drover’s Wife The Legend of Molly Johnson.

Tass is among the directors to have their work showcased at the event, with her documentary, Oleg: The Oleg Vidov Story, announced among the Australian premieres in the line-up.

Speaking to If, she said the festival had always been “invigorating”.

“The event is so elegant, but at the same time it is not empty,” she said.

“There is so much about films that is discussed, both in terms of the creative process and films as pieces of entertainment or communication with an audience.

“They have really thought about how they are going to excite people to come to the event.”

Tass...

Four female-driven stories covering a broad range of subject matter make up the contribution of Rush Films to this year’s CinefestOZ program.

Documentary projects Under the Volcano and Girl Like You join will join shorts Sparkles and Tooly at next month’s festival, showcasing a healthy cross-section of the company’s slate.

The selections are an endorsement for founder Cody Greenwood, who started Rush in 2016.

She said told If was “very exciting” to see the projects come together for the event.

“For me, I think it reflects an appetite from Australian audiences to view films that have different subject matter because when you look at them as a whole, they are four very different films made under very different circumstances,” she said.

There has already been a global appetite for Gracie Otto’s Under the Volcano, which premiered at this year’s SXSW in March and was due to...