Power Grads
Shalom Almond
My name is Shalom Almond, I’m a Documentary Filmmaker.
For the last eight years or so I’ve been working as a film director. I started off working on drama, but for the last few years, I’ve been focussing more on documentary which is quite a shift, so I’m really enjoying it.
It’s pretty hard to pick a favourite project really, they’ve all been so different and involved working with lots of different really interesting people from all over the world, lots of really interesting crew members who all have their own skills and different experiences and approaches to working. So it’s really hard to pick a favourite I guess but over the last three years or so, I’ve been working on a project in Vietnam which has been the most amazing experience personally and professionally. I went travelling about four years ago with my partner to north of Vietnam and developed a friendship there with a group of hill tribe girls, became absolutely obsessed with their story and their lives and when I came back to Australia I was determined to get some funding and go back and make a film about them. So, for the last three years I’ve been living between Australia and Vietnam following four hill tribe girls trying to grow up and become women in the face of tourism. So it’s definitely been an experience.
I studied a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Communication Studies and sub-majoring in Film Production. When I first started the course I didn’t really know that I wanted to pursue film but from the first lecture that I attended I was like, oh my god, this is it, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. So, the course definitely gave me the most brilliant opportunity to get where I am now. It gave the opportunity to work in a different number of fields, directing, producing, writing, camera. So, it really gave me the opportunity to have a test of each of the different roles and then pursue the one that you really loved.
I guess one of them most brilliant things about the course at UniSA was the teachers there totally went out of their way always to allow myself to be pushed to the limits and achieve everything that I wanted to achieve. At the time that I was studying there was no sixteen millimetre film component to the course and we spoke to the lecturers and said, we really want to make a film on sixteen mil, we really want to do this, we want to do that, they totally went out of their way always to accommodate to the further studies that we wanted to do there. So, I think that was a definite advantage to the way that the uni helped me get where I am now.
Studying at UniSA, Magill was also a brilliant opportunity to develop friendships and relationships with not only teachers there, but also students who I’ve continued to work with professionally to this day some eight years later. So, I developed on the first day of uni, I met a girl called Tamsin Sharp and we were put into the same film group and we continued to make films together for six years after we finished university and were quite successful working together. So, those kind of small friendships that you make back then, even back in uni I met just once a man who was interested in studying editing and now, six or seven years later we’ve met up and he’s gone from university and gone to the Australian Film and Television School to study editing and now he’s editing my current documentary. So, just small, little friendships and relationships that you form with people in those years still even now are coming through and we’re working together on projects, so it’s fantastic.