 Richard Watts reports on
the City of Melbourne Emerging
Filmmaker’s Award.
Photo: Toby Schmitz and Joel McIlroy star in Sophie
Hyde’s award-winning film, My Last Ten
Hours With You.
Director Sophie Hyde of South Australia
was $2000 richer last Saturday night, after her short film, My Last Ten Hours With You, was declared
the winner of the City of Melbourne
Emerging Filmmaker’s Award at the 2008 Melbourne Queer
Film Festival.
The film explores the dying hours of a relationship between
two gay men, Jeremy and Mark, as the former prepares to leaves Australia for Hanoi. Although Jeremy seems prepared for
departure, with his thoughts in another land, Mark sweetly attempts to sabotage
his plans, and desperately tries to remind Jeremy why he should not leave.
“Hyde deftly captures the abbreviated language and stilted
behaviour of two men who know each other by heart and are clearly in love, yet
increasingly unable to live together,” film critic Matt Riveria wrote of My Last Ten Hours With You.
Having already picked up an award for Best Film at Sydney’s Queer Screen film festival for the short drama,
Hyde says she was surprised and delighted to score another win in Melbourne.
“[To win in] Melbourne
is thrilling, particularly because we won the Audience Choice award as well,
which is not something I ever anticipated we would win! That’s just so fabulous,”
Hyde told MCV this week. “I feel very
grateful and fortunate. I wish I had been there, but my lovely sister
was, so she got to get up for me.”
Given the accomplished and assured style of My Last Ten Hours With You, it comes as
a surprise to learn that it is the first short drama Hyde has directed; a fact
which – coupled with homophobia – meant that making the film was a difficult process.
“It was very difficult to get funding for the film,” Hyde
explains.
“We first approached the South Australian Film Corporation
who weren’t interested… [perhaps because] it’s quite a subtle script. It’s
much more of an exploration than a telling, I think. And there were some pretty
suspect questions about the gay content, which made me feel quite defensive and
a bit angry, really.”
So why did she set out to make a story about two gay men and the slow, painful
death of their relationship?
“The loss and messiness and stilted communication is something
I am very interested in,” she answers. “How do people relate to each other, why
does it break down?”
“I felt a lot of the themes came from conversations with
many people, but a fair number of them were gay men. I feel very much that
these men, characters like this, are part of my culture and my life experience,
they are me and my friends. I grew up in a queer family, so it’s not something
I consciously decided to explore; it’s just very much about the characters
[and] the things I wanted to express.”
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