Sunday, November 27, 2011

Animal Murder Short Wins Pair of Prizes

Thanks to the 2011 Bondi Short Film Festival, 21-year-old Aussie writer-director Madeleine Parry now has an interesting decision to make. One of two prizes she was awarded this weekend for Murder Mouth is the Showtime Best Film Award, which covers return air fare to a North American film festival event of her choice.

Parry's short has gotten a fair amount of media attention Down Under because it features her slaughtering a chicken and shooting a sheep onscreen as part of her examination of what it really takes to get carnivorous items to the dinner table. She consulted beforehand with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). In Australia, “home slaughter” is entirely legal, but for Parry personally this was the first time she had extinguished anything larger than a spider.



Parry also won the Getty Images Best Cinematography Award, which comes with a $3,000 AU pre-paid Visa card and a 30% discount period on the firm's image license fees. It's been a good run so far for Parry. Her success began in the spring when she won an Audience Award at the South Australian Shorts Awards. Since then, she has screened the film previously in Sydney as well as in St. Kilda and at the Eden Docs festival in Scotland

Expect to hear a lot about this film stateside in 2012. The tagline, “You can't eat a steak without killing a cow,” is as provocative as the synopsis:

Madeleine loves her Greek family’s traditional lamb souvlaki but her friends claim that meat is murder. Well, Maddie's never killed anything bigger than a spider, so she decides to reconnect the animal and the meal or never eat meat again. After talking to the people who slaughter animals for their livelihood Maddie is encouraged to do it herself, but, even if she can kill an animal, will she want to eat it afterwards?

[Murder Mouth]

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