Anna Helme

Anna Helme is a filmmaker, video artist and impact media practitioner. Their hybrid documentary/fiction short MyMy (2014, 14mins) won Best Short at Queer Streisen 2015, (festivals include Outfest, Frameline, BFI Flare). Their short Continental Drift (2012, 15 mins) was nominated for the SBS Award at St Kilda Film Festival 2013, won Emerging Filmmaker Award at Queerscreen's MGFF, and broadcast on SBS TV. They have directed and co-directed numerous independent documentaries including Aquaporko! (2013, 23mins) about a fat femme synchronized swimming team (winner of Audience Award, Queerscreen MGFF 2013) and Cultural Flows (2012, 22mins), about cultural connection to water, produced in collaboration with the Wadi Wadi and Mutthi Mutthi indigenous nations, and broadcast on NITV in 2015. They are a Melbourne International Film Festival Accelerator talent workshop alumnus. They are a co-founder of EngageMedia (www.engagemedia.org), an Asia-Pacific participatory media organization focused on social-justice and environmental video, for which they received a Myer Foundation Dunlop Asia Fellowship in 2007, and with whom they has worked extensively with filmmakers and video artists around South East Asia. As a video artist they have performed live around Australia and internationally, including hybrid AV theatre work Electric Dreams commissioned for Nextwave 2004, and with AV pioneers Coldcut, with whom they have toured Europe and the UK and undertook an Australia Council supported artist placement at the Centre Pompidou in 2002. They have created single-channel video installations for Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art's 2014 Nightcraft, and MIX New York Queer Experimental Film Festivals in 2014 and 2015, and collaborated with Phillip Adams Ballet Lab to create experimental dance film. Anna has a passion for collaborating closely with communities, creating hybrids of documentary, narrative cinema and video art to produce uniquely told and deeply personal stories. They undertook an artistic practice-as-research PhD in moving image making practices at the University of Melbourne, VCA, in 2015.