Main Actress Required for VCA Graduate Film

I am in my final year of my Bachelor of Fine Arts (Film and TV) degree at the VCA. I'm looking for a lead actress (age 15-17) for my graduating short film, 'When I Go'.

When I was growing up, I went to an all-girls school and one of the highlights of the year was the father-daughter camp. Each year we would return to the same camping area South of Sydney’s city, completely surrounded by National Park and right next to the beach. It was a complete escape. Even years later, the impression of place is so clear in my memory. And so, in this place in the South of Sydney, my film is set. I had hoped to make the film in Sydney as well, but with the craziness of 2020 I've decided to return to Melbourne to make the film.

For a while now, I’ve been interested in exploring the human experience of grief. We experience it as a community, as an individual, and also through other people’s experience. The idea for When I Go came about when I was thinking about the father-daughter camps. And so I wondered, what if somebody wasn’t there who was the year before? The film surrounds the main character, fourteen-year-old Delilah. In the past year (since the last camp), her friend Phoebe has passed away. The film surrounds the idea of time having passed since the loss, but the feeling of someone missing still remaining in everyday life.

One of the things that I was sure of when writing this script was that I wanted it to be really subtle. I wanted the experience of grief to be second, and the camp to be first. As the girls go about their usual camping activities, such as kayaking and card games, everyone in the group is acutely aware of the loss, but no one speaks of it. A spanner is put in the works when Phoebe’s father, Peter, arrives at the camp. He was invited by the other fathers last minute to include him and support him in this hard time. When faced with loss, the community is so important in supporting one another. Peter’s presence at the camp, however, confuses Delilah’s experience of grief so far because now, she has to face it head on.

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