ELEANOR SHARPE & NICKOLAS BIRD

Directors

Nickolas Bird and Eleanor Sharpe are award winning filmmakers based in Melbourne, Australia. Nickolas and Eleanor run the independent production company Waterbyrd Filmz together. They studied filmmaking at AFTRS and VCA and are best known for long-form documentary story telling. Their works include: Vivian Bullwinkel: An Australian Heroine (2007, ABC1), Ballroom Rules (2011, ABC1), and Curtain Call (2014) which enjoyed its world premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival and screened on SBS1.

Remembering the Man (2015) is their latest work. This documentary won the audience awards at the Adelaide Film Festival, Sydney’s Mardi Gras Film Festival and at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival. Remembering The Man also won the David McCarthy award for best documentary at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, the jury prize for best documentary at the Miami LGBT Film Festival and the award for best documentary at the 2015 ATOM Awards. Nickolas and Eleanor have also being nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 2016 ADG awards and the 2016 AACTA awards. Currently Nickolas and Eleanor are working on a feature length documentary called MAMIL: Middle Aged Men in Lycra.

“We are so happy that our documentary film Remembering the Man is going to be part of this wonderful festival.

Remembering the Man is an intimate love story set in a time of war; a microcosm of the AIDS pandemic; a face to put on all the faceless victims of HIV; and an operatic story of tragedy and triumph. The relationship in this documentary transcends death and tragedy to become something triumphant and uplifting.

Making Remembering the Man has been a labour of love. It took four and a half years to make this film and you only spend that amount of time doing something if you are passionate about it. It was difficult to secure funding. It was difficult to find the interviewees and convince them to take part. It was difficult to track down and clear all the archive that appears in the film. But ultimately it has been an amazing experience to make this film and help preserve this story.”

PRESENTER

FYODOR DUBSHAN

Journalist

Fyodor, a journalist, was born in 1984 in Leningrad. A 2006 graduate of the St. Petersburg State University philosophy department, he has been writing about culture since 2002. He has worked for the newspapers Peterburgskii Chas Pik, Delovoi Peterburg, and Vechernii Peterburg, and the magazine Snob. Since 2011, he has been involved in social and political activism, in particular as an ally of the community in LGBT protests.