Eddie Diamandi

"Emily" is a short film written by Claire Ewart, directed by Eddie Diamandi and produced by Andrew Brinsmead. We’ve been working on this film for over a year now; we’ve shot the film, and now we’re nearing the end of post production – putting it all together.


“Emily” is the story of Gwen, a recent widow, who finds a note from another woman in her late husband’s poetry book. Gwen sets out to discover the mysterious Emily, and in turn to unravel the truth behind Gwen’s own marriage. In finding Emily, Gwen can finally reveal secrets about herself and discovers a second chance to connect with her beloved husband Frankie.


After developing the script for six months, in November 2014, “Emily” received the AMP Foundation Tomorrow Fund grant, which gave us access to high quality film making resources to make the best film that we could. Open Channel in Melbourne also came on board as a major supporter allowing us to use many of their resources to help us make our film.


Despite this support, high quality films are expensive to make, so during production, we stretched our budget as far as we could to make the most out of our resources, and this is reflected in the high production values that you see on screen.


We began pre-production in February 2015, and shot over three busy but productive days in March. Since then we’ve then returned to our day jobs, while we’ve been editing our film at night and on weekends, perfecting the edit to tell the story the best that we can, and we’re excited with what we’ve achieved! We’ve held several test screenings, and got lots of feedback from a variety of friends, family and industry colleagues to help us perfect our film.


We had a stellar crew (most of whom were volunteers passionate about the project) and an amazing cast including Francesca Waters, Diana Glenn and Alison Whyte. We’re very proud of what you will see in our film, and we think we’ve produced a short film that will get a lot of attention on the international film festival circuit!




“Emily” throws a spotlight on the issue of “functional illiteracy”. According the Australian Bureau of Statistics 47% of Australians are functionally illiterate, which means that they do not have the skills required to read and understand the label on a medicine bottle.


You can read more from the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Adult Literacy levels in Australia and their effects here:



http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Previouspr...




Literacy problems affect self-esteem and are often shrouded with shame. This makes it hard for people to reach out for help, particularly as they grow older. Emily hopes to show the value in opening up to the world of literature and poetry by having the courage to accept help


Now we’ve finished our editing, we need to put the film through its final stages of colour grading and sound mixing. These final polishes will enhance an already beautiful story, and subtly bring out the delicacies and nuances of the script. Unfortunately, we exhausted all of our resources during our filming, and these final polishes cost a lot of money (for us), but there is light at the end of the tunnel and this is where you come in…

Check out the writer of "Emily" talk a little bit about the project here...

The director of "Emily" talks a little bit about working on the film...

We would like to raise $6,500 to pay for the colour grade, sound mixing and marketing of “Emily”, so that we can share our film with the world. Unfortunately, film festivals aren’t cheap to enter, most major international festivals cost between $80 - $200 to enter, and add to this the cost of producing and mailing film festival entry materials (including high resolution digital copies of the film for screening), and our film festival entry costs add significantly.


The film is almost in its complete stage, but before we can have the final product we still need to do the following:

One of the great things about our project, is that most of it has already been done; you can see from our Pozible trailer the level of craft and detail that has gone into making our film.


The biggest challenge for us is the fact we have a great film, but a few hundred dollars are standing in the way of launching it onto the international scene.


A film like this needs to be released into the film festival circuit as soon as possible; the longer we delay this release, the more impact it will have on our chances of success..


Perhaps our plan for dealing with the lack of money is to say we will have to delay release and keep doing our day jobs to pay for it ourselves.