2020

 

The 2020 Solid Screen Awards have gone to the Aboriginal director and actresses involved in realising Total Control, a television political drama series first screened in 2019. The series was also the only Australian content to fill one of six slots internationally in the Primetime program of the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, where it premiered.

Each year Solid Screen Awards are bestowed internationally, but this year is the first time that all of the awards have gone to Aboriginal women who worked on a TV series in Australia. Total Control was a six-part series filmed in Winton, now dubbed Hollywood of the Outback, and also in Canberra, Sydney and Central West Queensland.

The Solid Youth Screen Culture Awards went to Bee Cruse (NSW) and Shantae Barnes-Cowan (SA). The role of JC was played by Shantae Barnes-Cowan, as her TV debut at 16 years of age, and named as one of the Casting Guild of Australias rising stars. Bee Cruse also works as a screen storyteller herself, and in Total Control she played the role of Jade, a custodian of urban culture.

The Solid Contribution to Screen Culture Awards went to Trisha Morton-Thomas (NT), Deborah Mailman (QLD) and Lisa Flanagan (SA) who all have extensive careers and have offered up their work over decades. Murri woman Deborah Mailman plays Senator Alex Irving in Total Control, her first leading role in a TV series, and Trisha Morton Thomas plays her mother, Jan Irving, along with Lisa Flanagan playing the role of family member Fay.

Joslin Eatts received the 2020 Solid Community Representation Award for her role as Brumby Dibby, a Winton Elder. A Great-grandmother in her 80's Joslin Eatts has also previously been named Winton's 2014 NAIDOC Elder of the Year in Far North Queensland, and been the leading subject of documentaries.

The Solid Screen Storyteller Award for 2020 went to Rachel Perkins, as the director (and co-writer) of Total Control, in a long line of credits to her name since training at CAAMA (NT) and then leaving at 21 to become the youngest female Executive Producer at SBS Television, generating programming for the Aboriginal Film Unit. Both Deborah Mailman and Trisha Morton-Thomas also worked on Perkins first feature film, Radiance in 1998, which was set on the coast in remote Queensland.

Presented independently by cyberTribe since 2014, this year the SOLID Awards also help mark the 20th anniversary of exhibitions and events and are shaped to showcase and enhance the local, national and international wealth of creative talent in the variety of artforms made by and for the screen. “It is timely to celebrate these seven sisters of the Total Control series, particularly while the Seven Sisters Dreaming star constellation is in our southern sky at this time of the year. The story reminds us that having a group of women who support and encourage, can help to persevere during times of severe testing and stress” said curator Jenny Fraser.

SOLID SCREEN Healing Retreat also went ahead this year, as a self-funded, physical distanced, scaled down version, with guests including 2016 Solid Screen Trail Blazer Award winner Kathy Fisher in attendance on Gubbi Gubbi Country. The SOLID SCREEN Awards for Indigenous Women in Screen honours those who have long standing and also emerging careers in the screen arts, those who have cut a track here in Australia and overseas. This is an important way of acknowledging artists, and other arts leaders who have contributed substantially to screen culture over the past 40 years.

http://www.worldscreenculture.tv/awards.html