Australia’s highest profile short film prize has gone to a black comedy by Melbourne film-maker Julian Lucas about a man who fakes his grandmother’s death to skive off work.
Lucas, 27, accepted top prize at Tropfest 2014 under now traditional summer storm clouds in Centennial Park, Sydney.
The writer and director’s seven-minute short, which has the tagline “the grandmother of all excuses”, stars Jack White as an office worker forced to attend a stranger’s funeral to keep up appearances with his co-workers.
Despite playing to smaller crowds, Granny Smith did one better than Lucas’s previous film Charades, which was a finalist in 2013.
Fellow Tropfest regular Jackson Mullane – a former professional rugby player and Gladiators TV star – was named runner-up for his short Red Nuts, another dark comedy about a man with terminal cancer. The film also picked up the best actor award for its lead, Kevin Isaac, an honour previously won by Avatar star Sam Worthington in 2001.
Third prize went to Stuart Bowen for Twisted – tagged “the good, the bad and the inflatable” – about a group of balloon animals.
More than 600 film-makers entered Tropfest 2014, which was judged by a panel including Margaret Pomeranz of ABC’s At the Movies, which airs its final episode on Tuesday.
