Sue Brooks

We Never Asked for This

Frankie and Charlie have moved to a tiny house. They regret it. It’s Christmas Eve. Frankie is miserable. Charlie’s organised a festive family lunch. Then Charlie finds a disoriented cockatiel by the river. She tucks him into a box and brings him inside. Little do they know – this bird has its own agenda. Nobody seems to notice something strange has started falling from the sky.

Baxter and Me

In this charming documentary, director Gillian Leahy combines her two great passions: dogs and film. She openly reveals her life story through a canine prism – lovers may come and go, but there are always the dogs. Leahy also weaves in her filmmaking career, starting out at the Women's Film Workshop in 1970s Sydney and the newly formed AFTRS. Dogs have carried her through childhood illness and heartbreak; in return she lavishes care, and frets over their waywardness. Today, she shares her life with a big brown Labrador called Baxter. There are echoes of Leahy's award-winning My Life Without Steve, a study in love and loss, in this meditative and romantic film.

Hope

Amal Basry watched 'Titanic' at a cinema in Baghdad the night before she fled Iraq. Eighteen months later, the people smuggling boat she was on sank between Indonesia and Australia. Three-hundred and fifty people drowned. Amal survived by clinging to the floating body of a dead woman for 22 hours. Now she fights to make sure the SIEV X disaster is not forgotten, to reunite her family and 'find what it was I lost in the ocean'...