'Monolith' thriller from South Australian film talent programme gets international premiere at 2023 SXSW in Texas
Lily Sullivan is star of Monolith, filmed in the Adelaide Hills, and created by the team (inset) of producer Bettina Hamilton, director Matt Vesely and writer Lucy Campbell, under the South Australian Film Corporation and Adelaide Film Festival's FilmLab: New Voices programme to develop and elevate first-time South Australian feature filmmakers.
South Australian sci-fi thriller Monolith, a hit at the 2022 Adelaide Film Festival, was to have an international premiere at the prestigious South by Southwest festival in 2023 in Austin, Texas.
South by Southwest (SXSW), a conference and festival convergence of tech, film, music, education and culture, was the pathway to the United States of Anerica’s market.
Featuring rising star Lily Sullivan (Evil Dead Rise, I Met a Girl, Picnic at Hanging Rock), Monolith was a taut mystery following a disgraced journalist (Sullivan) as she tried to salvage her career by turning to investigative podcasting. While trying to get to bottom of a strange artefact that may be linked to an alien conspiracy, she begins to uncover the lies at the heart of her own story.
Monolith was directed by Adelaide’s Matt Vesely, written by Lucy Campbell and produced by Bettina Hamilton, and filmed over three weeks in the Adelaide Hills. It was developed and produced through the FilmLab: New Voices programme to develop and elevate first-time South Australian feature filmmakers. The programme was run by the South Australian Film Corporation and Adelaide Film Festival, working with Mercury CX and Screen Australia finance.
Producer Bettina Hamilton of Black Cat White Rabbit Productions said it was extremely exciting to be working with XYZ Films (North America), Blue Finch Films (United Kingdom) and Bonsai Films (Australia, New Zealand) “to get Monolith out there and shared with audiences all around the world ... This has been an amazing outcome for our FilmLab film”.
Matt Vesely had previously directed successful shorts and worked as a writer across television and film. His short, the sci-fi comedy, System Error, was selected for the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival and opened the 2021 St Kilda Film Festival. Matt worked with award-winning collective Closer Productions. He was the story producer for Closer’s fourpart SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) television drama, The Hunting, starring Richard Roxburgh and Asher Keddie, and a writer and story producer for hit ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) comedy series Aftertaste, starring Erik Thomson and Rachel Griffiths.
South Australian Film Corporation chief executive Kate Croser said FilmLab: New Voices was a reboot of the corporation’s highly successful FilmLab programme that in the previous decade enabled the feature debuts of some of South Australia’s most talented film creators.
