Lee Whitmore

An inspiring English teacher transports her class into the very heart of a Persian poem.

It's the summer of 1954 and seven-year-old Lee Whitmore and her friends are drifting through the holidays, exploring their quiet suburban neighbourhood where nothing ever seems to happen... until the day mysterious strangers move in with the old lady next door. No one explains the odd comings and goings, the big black cars, the men in suits and hats, the overheard snippets of conversation, but that doesn't stop the children from imagining. The Safe House is a half-hour animation based on a true story - a young girl's innocent perspective of one of the most talked about moments in Australia's history - the real-life spy drama known as the Petrov Affair.

"In making Ada I was attracted to the idea of creating an animation about stillness and silence: two qualities we normally don't think of when it comes to animation. My grandmother Ada could no longer move with ease and rarely spoke." -Lee Whitmore

"On a Full Moon could be described as a poem to my mother who had died not long before. I wanted it to be as beautiful and contemplative as I could possibly make it. But I also know it had to be absolutely honest about what it's like to be a mum." -Lee Whitmore

BREATHING UNDER WATER is the story of a woman's journey into an imaginary underworld city. The birth of her daughter into an increasingly perilous world has unsettled everything in Beatrice's (Anne Louise Lambert) life. Her growing unease prompts Beatrice to undertake a journey - an investigation into human nature, a confrontation with the fears of our time, and a search for clues that will ultimately give her an answer to the central riddle of the film: why has humankind set the stage for its own extinction? The director’s preoccupation with humankind’s tendency to self-destruct was one factor that lead to the creation of this complex film.

A memoir of a family friend Ned Wethered. Ned frequently visited Lee’s home and brought with him mysterious things ‘he had been working on’. The film concentrates on the detail of these visits and on Lee’s family life. From watching Ned arrive through the back gate and him playing with their family cat, to Lee’s mother hanging out the clothes and doing the dishes the film builds up a poignant and often funny picture of the man Ned. “Why do I now remember him?” is the enigmatic question Lee leaves us with at the end.

When a womanizing bookshop owner hears about the suicide of a former girlfriend, he tries to find out more and meets her friend, a prostitute. They hook up, but when she finds her friend's diary, she discovers she's repeating her mistakes.