Margot Nash

Margot Nash began her career as an actor. She started out at the Melbourne Theatre Company and then joined the Australian Performing Group at the Pram Factory in Melbourne in the 1970s where she began videotaping shows and taking stills. After moving to Sydney she joined the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op and began freelancing in the independent film sector.

She has produced, written and directed a number of award-winning films as well as working as a cinematographer and editor. Her first film We Aim To Please (Robin Laurie & Margot Nash 1976) about female sexuality won a Jury Prize at L'Homme Regarde Homme film festival in Paris in 1978. We Aim To Please is represented in Screen Worlds, a permanent exhibition about the history of the moving image in Australia at ACMI in Melbourne. Margot was co filmmaker and editor on the 1982 feature documentary For Love or Money, about the history of women and work in Australia, which screened at Berlin, Toronto and the Tokyo International Women's Film Festival. For Love or Money received a UN Media Peace prize in 1985. For Love or Money and We Aim To Please were both digitally restored by the National Film and Sound Archive in 2017 and both screened in 'Personal and Political' a retrospective of Feminist Films from the 70s and 80s at the 2017 Sydney Film Festival.

Margot's short documentary Teno won the Jury Prize for Direction and Best Documentary in the ATOM Awards in 1984. Her 1989 short innovative drama Shadow Panic won an AFI Award for Best Cinematography, an ATOM Award for Best Innovative Film and a Red Ribbon for Film as Art at the American Film and Video Festival. Shadow Panic screened internationally at festivals including London, Hawaii and Clermont Ferrand and screened theatrically at the Phoenix Cinema in London supporting Chantal Ackerman's feature film Toute une Nuit (1982). In 2017 it screened at Cinenova in London.

In 1994 Margot wrote and directed Vacant Possession, a feature drama about family, racial conflict and the complexities of reconciliation for which she was nominated for Best Directing and Best Original Screenplay in the AFI awards. Vacant Possession screened at international festivals including Chicago, Hawaii and Asia Pacific and in 1996 won a Speciale Mention du Jury at the Films de Femmes festival in Créteil in Paris. For Love Or Money, Shadow Panic and Vacant Possession screened as part of a 'Tribute to Australian and NZ Women Filmmakers' at Créteil in 1999. In 2005 Margot directed her second feature Call Me Mum for SBS Independent. Call Me Mum screened at local and international festivals including Sydney, Adelaide and Créteil, won two AFI Awards in the telemovie category and was short-listed for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards and the AWGIEs.

Margot has worked as a consultant and a mentor for Indigenous filmmakers in Australia and in the Pacific. In 2012 she was the Filmmaker in Residence at Zurich University of the Arts where she developed a personal essay documentary about family secrets called The Silences. The Silences (2015) screened at a number of film festivals including NZIFF, MIFF and Amdocs in Palm Springs. In 2016 Margot won an Australian Writers' Guild AWGIE Award for the screenplay.

Margot worked as a Senior Lecturer in Communications at the University of Technology Sydney teaching screenwriting from 2000 – 2018 and is now an Honorary Associate Teaching and Research UTS. In 2019 she collaborated with performance artist Victoria Hunt to make the award-winning short Take. She is currently developing new work.

See www.margotnash.com

See also BREAD AND DRIPPING: www.roninfilms.com.au/feature/16827/bread-dripping.html

and FOR LOVE OR MONEY: www.roninfilms.com.au/video/881/0/757.html

Filmography

	LEAPING OFF THE EDGE » Melbourne's Women's Circus, originally established in 1991 as a vehicle for survivors of sexual assault, today thrives on the collective talents of an even broader range of women...
	CALL ME MUM » Set in the recent past, the AFI award-winning Call Me Mum is a series of interlinked monologues where five characters unravel a complex tale of mothering, race relations and family in Australia...
	SILENCES, THE » WINNER! AWGIE Award for Best Documentary (Public Broadcast or Exhibition) from the Australian Writers Guild, October 2016 A film about family secrets and the ties of love, loss and kinship between a mother and daughter...
	VACANT POSSESSION » NOW RE-MASTERED FROM ORIGINAL FILM MATERIALS! A welcome re-release of the acclaimed dramatic feature film from 1994, written and directed by Margot Nash (director of The Silences, also available from Ronin Films)...
	SHADOW PANIC » The innovative feminist classic from 1989, now restored from original 16mm film materials. Written, produced and directed by Margot Nash, director of VACANT POSSESSION and THE SILENCES...