Airdate: Oddlands

A one-off darkly humorous film about two toxic wasteland cleaners, Oddlands, will screen on ABC in March.

Written and directed by Bruce Gladwin, and starring Simon Laherty and Sonia Teuben, this won the Audience Award for Best Film at the 2017 Adelaide Film Festival.

It is produced by Matchbox Pictures and Back to Back Theatre , a company with an ensemble of actors with disabilities at its core.

This was made with seed funding from the HIVE Fund, an Adelaide Film Festival initiative supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, Screen Australia and ABC Arts and it recently received Story Development funding from Screen Australia to develop it into a 6-part television series.

With this production, Matchbox Pictures, one of Australia’s most dynamic production houses in Australia, has partnered with Back to Back Theatre, one of the country’s most important cultural exporters, to change national and international screen landscapes and present actors of difference in high profile contexts with wide audience appeal.

Simon Laherty and Sonia Teuben take on the roles of Des and Tam, members of a clean-up crew in a strange toxic wasteland. It’s a lousy job, but it’s the best they can get, and it may just get them what they want. When they stumble upon what may be the wasteland’s last human survivor, these determined but lowly Level 7s will have to decide between saving humanity or saving themselves. Oddlands is a story about two unlikely heroes who manage to find a little hope in the strangest of places. The question is, what will they do when they find it?

Oddlands also features Jacek Koman (Jack Irish, The Warriors) and seasoned theatre actor Robin Ramsay (The Damnation of Harvey McHugh). In addition, Belinda McClory (The Doctor Blake Mysteries) lends her voice to the production as the voice of corporate juggernaut, Civix.

As with all of Back to Back Theatre’s work, Oddlands was developed in collaboration with the ensemble actors of the company and Artistic Director Bruce Gladwin. Working in the medium of film has presented a new challenge for Gladwin, who acknowledges that while in the making of Oddlands he was on a steep learning curve, he is excited to bring this story to a wider television audience.

In addition to its television premiere, Oddlands may enjoy a further screen life, as Matchbox Productions recently received Story Development funding from Screen Australia to seek to develop the short film into a 6-part television series.

In further exciting news for Back to Back Theatre, this month the BBC will broadcast a feature on its 2018 short film Radial, which the company made with and for the National Theatre of Scotland with a group of young people in Dundee. Back to Back Theatre has been creating films in collaboration with communities across Australia and the world. A moving portrait of a place, its landscape and its people, Radial is one of more than thirty short films made by the company in the last decade.

Oddlands received seed funding from the HIVE Fund, an Adelaide Film Festival initiative supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, Screen Australia and ABC Arts. Oddlands has also received endorsement from Film Victoria via Assigned Production Investment Fund for Film & Television and its Regional Location Assistance Fund, as well as the Thyne Reid Foundation, The Anthony Costa Foundation and the City of Greater Geelong.

10pm on Sunday 10 March on ABC.