The Producers

Sera is a director, cinematographer, photographer and video artist whose work has been screened both nationally and internationally. Sera has directed and shot documentaries and short films with some of Australia’s hardest to reach communities and most prolific arts and social change companies and NGO’s, such as Big hART Inc, Back to Back Theatre and World Vision. She is passionate about representing people who are under-represented in traditional media. She has worked on numerous films, documentaries, video installations, music videos and TVC’s, including Big hART’s documentaries for the ABC Drive and Nothing Rhymes with Ngapartji, Back to Back theatre’s film installation The Democratic Set, and Genevieve Lacey’s sound and film work Pleasure Garden. Namatjira Project is the first feature film Sera has directed.

Making The Film

As a filmmaker, the heart of our country has provided me with an invaluable and privileged education. It’s required me to fashion a craft in scrambling around the slippery circumference of our single east-coast story and pushing outward for another view. It is quiet and urgent work. It’s working in the shadows, always listening and observing, and then stepping out blushing but brave when the story demands. It’s thousands of dusty kilometres in rubbish cars with bomb-proof equipment boxes and maybe a baby rattling around in the back. It’s shooting and editing and mentoring and trying to hold onto bits of languages and ways of understanding this country so foreign to me. It’s embracing not presuming to know anything of how it is to be another person and the freedom that brings to your work together. It’s being filled up. It’s this process that allows us to go to the heart of the film, as we traverse the intersections where our stories meet. - Sera Davies