Cinefest prize film poignant

Eccentric coming-of-age film Girl Asleep has won the coveted CinefestOz Film Prize, taking away $100,000 as part of the accolade.

Speaking to theTimes after the win, producer Jo Dyer said the team had not gone in thinking they stood a chance at winning.

“We were just very pleased to be on the shortlist and to go,” she said.

Girl Asleep centres around 14-year-old Greta Driscoll, a chronically shy girl, who has just moved to a new town with her family and started at a new school, where she befriends a happy loser called Elliott.

However, after her mother decides to throw Greta a 15th birthday party, things start to go wrong and Greta retreats into her room, falls asleep and goes into a wild, imaginative dream world.

Girl Asleep was adapted from a theatre production that premiered in Adelaide in 2014.

Dyer said when the play was produced, funding had already been secured to adapt it to a screenplay.

“As the play was being rehearsed and staged, they knew it would be developed and started working on how to transition it into a screenplay,” she said.

Dyer said the shoot was treated like it was a theatre piece, with characters such as the forest creatures being created through the use of costumes rather than in post-production.

Dyer was not involved in the production of the play but said the film offered a great opportunity to express the psychological world where Greta dreams.

“A very beautiful world was created, which could be explained more when it was not on stage,” she said.

“We had a really evocative strong film created in a theatrical way.”

The film’s world premiere was at the Adelaide Film Festival last year before it premiered internationally at the Berlin International Film Festival’s Generation 14plus program in February.

Dyer said the film appealed to people of all ages because they could relate to the themes of growing up.

The film will be released nationally this week and then internationally later this month in countries including the United States, France, Taiwan, Korea, Poland and Italy.

“We are very fortunate to be showing the film in a number of places around the world,” she said.

When announcing Girl Asleep as the winner of the CinefestOz Film Prize, jury chairwoman Gillian Armstrong said the decision was completely unanimous. “The film was a dazzling treat, brave, clever, funny and heartfelt with a wonderful cast and performances,” she said.

“Beautifully, wickedly designed and shot, it was a visual treat with a brave and successful heightened style that never took us out of the humanity and poignancy of the story.”

Dyer said there were plans to put some of the money towards advertising to boost the release of the film in Australia and attract more people to screenings.

Girl Asleep will be screened at Orana Cinemas as part of Film Harvest on Wednesday, October 19 at 6.15pm.

Tickets will go on sale in the last week of September.