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Meet the Adelaide Studios Tenant: Shalom Almond
21 November 2025
The SAFC’s Adelaide Studios isn’t just a screen production facility, it’s a creative hub that’s home to dozens of South Australian screen businesses and screen practitioners. In this ongoing series of SAFC interview profiles, we invite you to meet the tenants and get to know their work.
As a documentary filmmaker, being able to connect with your subjects is an essential skill. Luckily for South Australian writer, director and producer Shalom Almond, it’s also one of her favourite things about making observational documentaries.
“I just love to be able to convey that care and investment I have in them through the lens, and then to have the audience feel that too,” she tells us when we catch up to talk about her filmmaking journey.
Her latest film, Songs Inside, has undoubtedly made audiences care deeply about the film’s subjects – a group of incarcerated women discovering the healing power of music. The film follows Barkindji singer-songwriter Nancy Bates and her ground-breaking Songbirds program, which teaches women in prison how to play an instrument and write songs about their experiences.
Supported by the SAFC and the Adelaide Film Festival (AFF) Investment Fund, Songs Inside premiered at AFF 2024 where it received the Audience Award for Feature Documentary. It has gone on to win the Documentary Australia Award at the Sydney Film Festival, the CinefestOz Film Prize, and was selected for the Melbourne International Film Festival.
Shalom has been making films for 26 years, ever since she graduated university. She got her start in short films, working towards a goal of making drama features, but a backpacking trip around southeast Asia changed the trajectory of her career entirely.
“I met a community of girls who were living on the streets in northern Vietnam and just became obsessed with their lives and their situation and felt determined to come back and make a documentary about them,” Shalom says.
She’d never made a documentary before, but she didn’t let that stop her. And since then, documentaries have been her sole focus.
“It just sparked something in me that I didn’t even know existed.”
Songs Inside has been in development since 2018. The seeds were planted even earlier with an ABC-commissioned documentary called Prisoners and Pups, which allowed Shalom to go into the Adelaide Women’s Prison for the first time.
“The experience for me as a filmmaker, and also personally, was just so mind blowing and moving that after I finished that film, I felt so determined to try to get back into that space to do a deeper and a broader work,” she says.
When the SAFC awarded her the Lottie Lyell Award, this gave her the development funding needed to pursue her next project. Unbeknownst to Shalom, while she was inside filming Prisoners and Pups, singer-songwriter Nancy Bates was also in the prison, teaching singing and songwriting to First Nations women.
It wasn’t until a year later that their lives crossed on the outside. They connected immediately and hatched the idea to go back in to make a film about “the power of music, and how that could potentially help to heal and transform women’s lives once they got out.”
“So fast forward to five years later, that film became Songs Inside.”
The film’s social impact campaign was developed concurrently with the film itself, an approach that allowed Shalom and the film’s other producers, Katrina Lucas and Lauren Drewery, to discover themes as they were unfolding during filming – themes including trauma, domestic family violence and addiction.
Their goal has been to reach as many “diverse and eclectic” audiences as possible. The anchor of the impact campaign has been a screening tour, engaging different communities and services who are working with women once they get out of prison.
“It’s been a really nice conversation piece that has opened up a lot of bigger and deeper conversations around the issues that affect incarcerated women, and to put a human face to so many of those women in the film.”
Many of the film’s screenings have been accompanied by a musical performance and Q&A with members of the Songbirds, which has been a lifechanging experience for them.
“It sounds so cliché,” Shalom says, but even now some of the women are being asked to speak outside of Songs Inside screenings.
Clancy, one of the women featured in the film, recently attended the National Drug and Alcohol Conference to share her experiences with addiction – and had the whole room “in stitches and in tears.”
Another, Fabian, is studying full time to become a social worker. She already has multiple job offers on the table from people who want to employ her as a lived experience expert, working with other previously incarcerated people.
In between travelling all over the country in support of the film, Shalom has also been busy setting up her office in the SAFC’s Adelaide Studios facilities in Glenside, which she moved into about eight months ago.
She just knew Adelaide Studios would be a “perfect fit” for her and her Songs Inside colleagues, including long-time collaborator Katrina Lucas, and had been on the waitlist for a tenancy for several years.
“We’ve always sort of tag teamed between our houses and just made it work. But I think as times rolled on, it’s become really challenging to work from home with children who are growing up. And so we’ve felt so passionate for so long around wanting to get a space at Adelaide Studios,” Shalom says.
It’s given them a base to work from for the impact campaign and allowed them to connect easily with other Songs Inside crew in the building, including editor David Scarborough, which has been “super handy”.
One of the biggest skills that Shalom has learned over the course of her career is to “thrive on rejection.”
Because she had no documentary experience, she faced “knockback after knockback” with her first film, The Love Market, about the girls on the street in Vietnam. The experience taught her to turn rejection into her “actual superpower”, to stay the course and keep pushing through.
Shalom says that documentary filmmaking is “such a long game with each project, it just feels like a constant exercise in backing yourself and your ideas endlessly.”
Luckily members of the South Australian screen industry have always been a source of strength. Having been a part of the sector since she was 20 years old, people have often asked Shalom if she’s thought about moving interstate. But for her, she’s always found South Australia “such a kind, nurturing, supportive place to be.”
“As a woman in the film industry, I’ve always felt so supported, so encouraged, so nurtured, and I just love being a part of it. That’s the honest truth of it.”
When asked about what’s next for her, the only thing Shalom knows for sure is that she needs a holiday.
With Songs Inside set to premiere on ABC in December, Shalom still has lots to do to make the most of the opportunities around the film. But after that she’s planning on enjoying school holidays with her kids before she starts development on another documentary.
“I’m just going to take my time to find the right project.”
Songs Inside airs on Monday 1 December at 8.30pm on ABC TV and ABC iview. Learn more about the film at www.songsinside.com.au
By Alex Knopoff