Green Room: CreateSA grant winners, Cobham-Hervey directs, Flickerfest
South Australian arts and culture news in brief.
Artists get the bag
Who needs a crystal ball when the latest wave of grant funding serves up a tantalising glimpse of upcoming creative projects across the state? In April the newly re-badged Create SA announced that a total of 57 projects had claimed a stake in a ~$976,500 pool of money in its February 2025 funding round.
Restless Dance Theatre is the biggest beneficiary, awarded $45,270 for an upcoming international tour which will include a residency in Hong Kong and a UK run for its Ruby Award-winning show Shifting Perspectives, which premiered at Illuminate Adelaide in 2023.
Adelaide theatregoers might recognise actor Ashton Malcolm from a range of productions, including a star turn in State Theatre Company South Australia’s Euphoria. Well, she’s scored $43,989 for an upcoming season of English playwright Miriam Battye’s Scenes with Girls, a ‘Broad City meets Fleabag’ drama that will see Malcolm step up to the director’s plate.
Its December 2025 season at Goodwood Theatre is being presented by new-ish indie company Deux Ex Femina as part of State Theatre’s Stateside program. Deux Ex Femina, incidentally, have also scored $28,120 from CreateSA for the second stage creative development of another project called HERSAY.
Theatre Republic’s new artistic director Emily Steel will have $34,935 to play with for a third iteration of its Future: Present incubator series, which pits hot new talent against hot-button issues. On the musical front, composer Fleur Noble has received $27,800 to develop a new youth-focussed project titled Sunshine and the Dark Cloud.
In dance, Ngarrindjeri, Narungga and Kaurna dancer and choreographer Caleena Sansbury has been awarded $24,990 for Mullamar, a “rich, multidimensional exploration of her great-grandmother Mary Cooper’s life” created in collaboration with Adrian Semmens and Kaine Sultan Babij. Sansbury is currently developing Mullamar as part of Australian Dance Theatre’s Blak Futures Residencies program.
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On the literary front, Writers SA will also create a First Nations-focussed edition of its new literary mag, Splinter Journal with $23,131 in CreateSA funding. Splinter editor — and InReview contributor — Farrin Foster has also been given $11,357 to work on the manuscript for her debut book, The Same House. Comedian and health advocate Libby Trainor Parker is also set to write a follow-up to 2023’s Endo Days: life, love and laughter with endometriosis with a $15,000 grant to develop At a Loss: a how-to guide to surviving grief and pregnancy loss.
$23,300 will support the development of Proudlock, a new novel from author Lyn Dickens whose debut Salt Upon The Water was just acquired by Wakefield Press after winning the Unpublished Manuscript Award at the 2024 South Australian Literary Awards. Salt Upon The Water — a historical novel fictionalising the life of Colonel William Light to explore “how his little-known mixed race heritage shapes our understanding of Australian culture today” — is already high on our 2025 to-read list, so we’re keen to see what else Dickens has in the pipeline.
Read the full list here — and artists, start prepping for the July round now.
Cobham-Hervey to write/direct first feature
Adelaide multi-hyphenate Tilda Cobham-Hervey is set to film her long-awaited debut feature as writer-director-star when the intergenerational nursing home drama It’s All Going Very Well No Problems At All starts rolling.
Supported by the South Australian Film Corporation, it’s the first full-length screenplay by the homegrown star to enter production; Cobham-Hervey has previously been linked to adaptations of two books, Miriam Toewes’ Irma Voth and Robert Wainwright’s biography of Sheila Chisholm.
It’s All Going Very Well No Problems At All will see Cobham-Hervey, who recently appeared in Netflix’s Belle Gibson biopic Apple Cider Vinegar, star as a young artist “teetering on the edge of a quiet collapse” while working at an aged care home. Things start looking up when she strikes up a friendship with a resident named Harold, and the pair form a “profound connection”.
Tilda Cobham-Hervey. Photo: Matt Loxton / Supplied
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Since making her screen debut as a teenager in Sophie Hyde’s naturalistic family drama 52 Tuesdays — filmed in and around Adelaide over a calendar year — Cobham-Hervey has regularly returned to her hometown for screen projects including F***ing Adelaide, Hotel Mumbai and Girl Asleep, while also originating the role of Esme in State Theatre Company South Australia’s hit adaptation of Pip Williams’ The Dictionary of Lost Words.
“I’m incredibly grateful to have the support of the SAFC for my directorial debut, which we’re so excited to be filming in Adelaide – my hometown,” Cobham-Hervey says. “It is a great privilege to have the chance to collaborate with so many extraordinary Adelaide creatives, some whose work I’ve admired for years, and others I’ve had the joy of growing up alongside.”
Still from Marcia and the Shark. Photo: Supplied
Local connections at Flickerfest
That annual celebration of the short, Flickerfest, will return to Adelaide next weekend for a one-night-only screening of award-winning shorts from around Australia and the world. Picked from a pool of 3,500 entries — a new high watermark for the festival — this year’s program includes seven titles with South Australian ties, including Dragon’s Breath, a middle school talent show drama co-produced by former MusicSA head Lisa Bishop, and director Sam Ferris Bryant’s Marcia and the Shark.
The latter is inspired by the life of Marcia Nellie Hathaway, an Australian actress made famous after being fatally attacked by a shark in Sydney Harbour in 1963, and pairs two Adelaide faces in the aforementioned Tilda Cobham-Hervey and Eamon Farren. The pair previously shared billing in Windmill Pictures’ Girl Asleep before going on to a number of big projects. Farren has also turned up in Netflix’s Witcher, while his sinister turn in the late David Lynch’s 2017 Twin Peaks revival continues to haunt. Farren and Cobham Hervey also both appear in Sophie Hyde’s Jimpa, due to screen locally later this year after premiering at Sundance in January.
Dragon’s Breath and Marcia and the Shark will both be screened at the Mercury on Saturday May 10 in a 6pm showcase, The Best of Australian Shorts, before a 9pm session of international highlights in the Best of International Shorts. The latter will include the Australian premiere of the hirsute Belgian animated flick Beautiful Men, and Rhubarb Rhubarb, about a father and daughter working in the “legendary Yorkshire Rhubarb Triangle”. We’re sold.
Flickerfest 2025 hits The Mercury on Saturday May 10.
SALA Contemporary Art Tour. Photo: Sam Roberts / Supplied
SALA Festival registrations open
The festival wheel keeps turning with the South Australian Living Artists Festival opening registrations for its 2025 program, set to take over galleries, libraries, cafes, and practically every other unclaimed corner of the public sphere from August 1 – 31.
Artists and venues can both jump on the SALA website to register — the only criteria for entering is “identify[ing] as South Australian” and be hosting an exhibition within the state that month. We suppose you have to be alive as well — it’s hard to hold a paintbrush when you’re a ghost.
“SALA Festival is about community, creativity and welcoming visual artists at every stage of life and practice to take part, whether you’re exhibiting from a home studio, a supermarket, kindergarten or gallery – or something totally unexpected – there’s a place for you in SALA,” says SALA interim CEO Bridget Alfred.
Registrations close May 14, for more information and to register head to the SALA website.
Green Room is a regular column for InReview, providing quick news for people interested, or involved, in South Australian arts and culture. Get in touch by emailing us at [email protected]