ABOUT
An experimental film that explores our ancient and complex relationship with the Moon.
A commercially-driven, international Space Race has propelled us to this moment in the 21st century: within a few years, the Moon’s surface may be subject to permanent human occupation, its resources aggressively mined for profit, and its ancient nature-spaces polluted by private industry.
Do we want to stand by silently as such irreparable damage is caused to our sister satellite? What if we actually listened to what the Moon had to say?
Based on an original poem by award-winning Australian author Ceridwen Dovey, Moonrise is a striking, surreal montage of historical, artistic and scientific lunar imagery that invites us to consider the Moon’s point of view in the face of increasingly exploitative human activity in space.
“We must learn to approach the Moon as a co-participant in its future, and to see our sister satellite not as a simple repository of raw materials or cosmically irradiated rocks with which we can do what we like, as possessions and property—but as our kin.”
Our Team
Rowena Potts
Director, Editor and Archive Producer
Rowena Potts is a filmmaker and visual anthropologist. Her short films have explored a wide range of subjects, from the relationship between people and animals in urban settings to the legacy of a famous literary hoax in Australian cultural history. Her observational portrait of two New York pigeon breeders (They Come Home, 2017) won the Grand Jury prize for documentary short at the Independent Film Festival in Boston. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from New York University, and a graduate diploma in documentary from the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS). Her writing can be found in the Visual Anthropology Review.
Ceridwen Dovey
Writer and Producer
Ceridwen is a fiction writer and essayist based in Sydney. She’s the author of several works of fiction (Blood Kin, Only the Animals, In the Garden of the Fugitives, and Life After Truth), and non-fiction (On J.M. Coetzee: Writers on Writers and Inner Worlds Outer Spaces: The Working Lives of Others). Her essays have been published by newyorker.com, the Smithsonian Magazine, WIRED, the Monthly, and Alexander. She won a prestigious 2020 Australian Museum Eureka Award for her long-form essay critiquing the commercial push to mine the Moon, and she won the 2020 UNSW Press Bragg Prize for Science Writing for her essay on Moon dust.
Annie Breslin
Sound Designer
Annie Breslin is an award-winning film, theatre and interactive sound designer with credits spanning Mad Max 2, Evil Angels and Baz Luhrmann's Australia as well as sound design installations for the Australian War Memorial and the Melbourne Aquarium. She was Head of Sound at the Australian Film Television & Radio School (AFTRS) from 1996 to 2001 where she co-wrote and introduced Australia's first full time, tertiary Screen Composition course. Annie is currently the moving image specialist on a mass film and video digitisation project at the State Library of NSW. Previously an archivist at Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) and National Archives Australia (NAA), she is an audio-visual archivist, curator and general obsessive about Australian film culture and its preservation.
Bronwyn Cumbo
Composer
Bronwyn is a composer, musician and design researcher. Some of her notable compositions include Tall Stories (Melbourne Festival), Dawn (Silent Spring) and the scores to the documentary Umoja: No Men Allowed (Director: Elizabeth Tadic), the short-film Happy Ending (Director: Selene Alcock), and the animation Mountainfold (Director: Renee Boucher). She has arranged and designed a number of contemporary works for a variety of ensembles and music for theatre, including Bienvenue à Breville (Adelaide Fringe Festival). Bronwyn is a violinist and pianist in the experimental duo Silent Spring, which has performed both nationally and internationally. More recently Bronwyn has explored how sound and interaction design can be combined to create immersive audio experiences that connect people in cities to the natural world. Her most recent installations include Flotsam and Jetsam (Hijinks Festival, Sydney Aquarium) and Aural Fixations (City | Data | Future, Venice). Bronwyn is currently working as a postdoctoral research fellow at Monash University, with a specific interest in how participatory and speculatory design approaches can be used to promote formative experiences between children and other species and ecosystems.
Traveling by Moonlight, Kawabata Gyokushō, 1800.
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Buzz Aldrin's Footprint on the Surface of the Moon, 1969.
Courtesy of NASA.
A Trip to the Moon, short educational film, 1928.
Courtesy of Prelinger Archives.
Moon Model, Newsreel, 1963.
Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive and Cinesound Movietone Productions.
NASA Subject Sitting at Controls, LOLA Project, 1961.
Courtesy of NASA.
Two Men Contemplating the Moon, Caspar David Friedrich, ca. 1825-30.
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Sky: A Film Lesson in Nature Studies, 1928.
Courtesy of Prelinger Archives.
Seascape in Moonlight, James Nasmyth, 1877.
Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.
Earth Rise, Apollo 8, taken by astronaut Bill Anders in 1968 as the first crewed spacecraft circumnavigated the Moon.
Courtesy of NASA.
St. Kilda Film Festival
Melbourne
May 21-29 2021
Selected to screen as part of three curated panels of Australian short films:
Shifting the Gaze: Focus on Women Filmmakers, presented by Women in Film & Television Victoria (WIFT);
Final Year in Motion: VCE Screening, a selection of films with inspiring messages, distinctive styles, and unique approaches to their subjects, to inspire future filmmakers;
Tales of Mystery & Imagination, a selection of films exploring other worlds and places through cinema.
Bunjil Place Outdoor Screen Program, Melbourne
Museum of the Moon
June 26 - July 4 2021
Mimesis Documentary Festival
Boulder, Colorado
August 4-10, 2021
Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, Making Space for the Social Sciences
August 17, 2021
LIVEWORKS Festival of Experimental Art 2021
LIVE FUTURES: Remapping Ecologies
(A panel curated by Holly Williams)
Thursday, October 21, 2pm
Uppsala Short Film Festival
Uppsala, Sweden
October 25-31, 2021
Calcutta International Short Film Festival
Kolkata, India
December 17-19, 2021
Antenna Documentary Film Festival
Sydney, Australia
February 2-13, 2022
Revelation Perth International Film Festival
Perth, Australia
July 7-17, 2022
Sydney Science Festival
Space Imaginaries Symposium at the Powerhouse Museum
August 18, 2022
Selected to screen as part of a curated program for Museum of the Moon, a giant replica of the moon created by UK artist Luke Jerram, which will be installed at Bunjil Place in Melbourne.
Selected to screen as part of the Biomythophilia block of documentary shorts: a diverse group of documentaries linked by the theme of sustainability, exploring ideas of mythical communion with the land and others, the search for scientific and eco-existential answers, more-than-human solidarity, and the rejection of human exceptionalism.
Screened as part of a panelled session titled Sensemaking about Space.
As the inevitability of global warming becomes impossible to ignore and human-caused extinctions become widespread, how might the body-centred practices of the deep ecology movement, activist interventions and the work of contemporary artists inform where we go from here?
How can we reinstate different relationships between humans and the network of animals, organisms, weather and environment that we are inextricably connected to? How can we constructively meet the grief, fear, rage and guilt that marks this time? Where might hope lie?
LIVE FUTURES is a series of curated public conversations that explore the pivotal role of artists in defining the new civic life we are entering, in a sustained period of disruption and change.
