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SAFC Launches Lottie Lyell Award
06 August 2018
SAFC today launched a new award to commemorate Lottie Lyell’s trail-blazing impact on the screen industry and provide significant financial support to a female-driven screen project.
The annual Lottie Lyell Award is for a female screen practitioner, based in South Australia, who is as innovative in our time as Lottie was in hers.
The Award provides a $20,000 prize to go towards the development or delivery of a screen-based work which is bold, ambitious and full of promise.
Screen pioneer Lottie Lyell was a writer, producer, director, editor and art director, and an accomplished horsewoman who did all her own stunts.
Together with her partner in work and life Ray Longford, Lottie made 28 films, before she died aged 35. Their production company, the Southern Cross Feature Film Co, was the first production company founded in South Australia, and it made its very first feature – The Woman Suffers – regarded as Australia’s first feminist film, exactly 100 years ago. The following year they made The Sentimental Bloke, the most successful Australian film of its day.
100 years after Lottie’s production company was formed in South Australia, the SAFC is seeking applications for the award named in her honour – it could be for a draft script for a feature film, or a TV series bible; it could be development materials for a documentary, or a game, it could be to finish a film, or it could be to make art of the moving image; it could be any screen based work that is bold, ambitious and full of promise.