The Australian film with a ‘tiny’ budget winning international awards

April 1, 2025 journo

Australian director Sophie Somerville describes the budget for her first feature film as “really, really small, small”, then, lest there be any doubt about how meagre it was, she adds “tiny”.

Scraping together every last dollar, Somerville decided to shoot a comic drama about two friends walking the streets of Melbourne as they grapple with the issues facing women in their 20s.

Director Sophie Somerville (centre), with actors Melissa Gan (left) and Emmanuelle Mattana at Fern Gully Health and Wellbeing Garden, which features in Fwends.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui

It paid off – Fwends was selected for the Berlin International Film Festival, won the Caligari Prize for “stylistically and thematically innovative film” and is about to begin an Australian festival run. It is among the first titles announced today for the Sydney Film Festival (SFF) in June and will also screen at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) in August.

“I was thinking of ways I could do a really fun, interesting story using only two characters,” Somerville says. “I built the characters and the themes, and the journey they go on came out of that.”

When young Sydney lawyer Em (Emmanuelle Mattana) visits longtime Melbourne friend Jessie (Melissa Gan) for a weekend, their often light-hearted conversations cover ambition, work, relationships, the challenge of home ownership, climate anxiety, the cost of living, mental health and sexual harassment.

The dialogue was all improvised, with Somerville and a small crew filming the two actors from a distance – using long lenses – while wheeling their camera and other equipment around in beach carts.

“Embedding” the characters in the environment, they filmed for 10 days around the CBD, Carlton and Fitzroy, taking advantage of locations with free filming permits.

“I just wanted to make a really unconventional film because we were making it outside the system,” Somerville says. “I wanted to create my own rules.

“So instead of working with a script that was very, very premeditated, planned and calculated, I wanted to create our own working methodology where we could leave a lot to be decided in the moment.”

Somerville also wanted to imbue it with hope. “I just think there are too many depressing films,” she says.

Mattana jumped at the chance to work on Fwends after reading a 17-page treatment that Somerville had written.

“Something that I really love about Sophie as a filmmaker, and that I wish I had more of in myself, is this crazy sense of artistic trust,” she says. “I’ve never met anyone who’s so comfortable sitting with the uncertainty of a thing.

“So this treatment wasn’t what the film would be. It was ‘let’s meet these characters, here’s where they are in their life, here’s what I’m curious about, here’s what they might talk about’.”

“I sneakily had my phone in my back pocket”: Fwends stars Melissa Gan, (left) and Emmanuelle Mattana.Credit: Sydney Film Festival

Mattana says they often forgot the camera was there.

“A lot of my background is in theatre so it was this strange gift where, rather than a camera being in your face, you’re like, ‘I’ve got this whole world to play with’. There was something really cool about that.”

The actors built up the relationship between the friends during rehearsals.

Says Gan: “We went from there: ‘how did they become friends?’, ‘what did they do after they graduated?’, ‘how did they grow differently?’ then ‘what might it become now when they meet each other again?’”

When it came time to shoot Fwends, it was not so much a road movie but a footpath movie.

“I sneakily had my phone in my back pocket and I was tracking the number of steps that we were doing every day,” Gan says. “We were getting a lot of steps in, maybe 20,000 a day.

“We got so hungry, just snacking all the time.”

SFF director Nashen Moodley describes Fwends as “something so original” from a director whose promise was apparent when she won short film prizes at the festival in 2021 and 2023.

“It’s a very smart film about friendship and how friendships and people change,” he says. “It’s a film made with limited resources but it has a great deal of heart. We want to treasure these young filmmakers and follow their careers.”

Also selected for the festival are Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, about Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart confronting his fading career on the opening night of Oklahoma!, satirical body horror film Slanted, about a Chinese-American teen who undergoes a racial transformation to become white, and Canadian comedy Racewalkers, about competitive walking.

Australian films set to screen include Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese’s comic Australian animation Lesbian Space Princess, Samuel Van Grinsven’s horror pic Went up the Hill, which stars Dacre Montgomery and Vicky Krieps, and Justin Kurzel’s documentary Ellis Park, about musician Warren Ellis.

The full program for Sydney Film Festival, which runs from June 4 to 15, is announced on May 7.

The “first glance” of the Melbourne International Film Festival, which runs from August 7 to 24, is on June 5.