When around 300 screen practitioners gathered at Lennox Head last week for ScreenWorks’ two-day Regional to Global Screen Forum, the setting was half the story. Here was a serious industry conversation happening a long way from Sydney or Melbourne, and after many successful years, nobody was treating that as a novelty.
The take-home message was that geography shouldn’t decide whose stories get made, and that the distance between a regional creator and a global audience is shorter than it looks.
MC, comedian and writer Steph Tisdell set the tone early, telling the room that it was all about connection, finding your people, and embracing your own weirdness rather than sanding it off to fit.
The event included a mix of formal and informal events, including roundtables, networking sessions and panels on craft, money, broadcasters, festivals, AI and streaming, with many of Australia’s best writers, directors, producers, commissioning editors and screen executives in attendance.
Lightning in a bottle
Presenting their documentary about the making of Crocodile Dundee, filmmakers Delvene Delaney and Victoria Baldock explained how the act of restoring the original film had surfaced a rich, half-forgotten archive.
That discovery grew into a love letter to John Cornell and the whole team, who turned an improbable, self-funded Australian picture into a global phenomenon.
The creators of Love of an Icon talked about the emotional edit of their documentary, and the choice to foreground heart, craft and values rather than pursue the obvious tabloid angles. It became a study of how to capture lightning in a bottle.
Specificity travels. That was a recurring message in the 2026 forum. The more precisely rooted a story is in a particular place, community and point of view, the further it can go.
The team behind Top End Bub described expanding their film Top End Wedding into a series grounded in Darwin and the Tiwi Islands, using rom-com warmth to show Aboriginal characters as complex, funny and flawed rather than as problems to be solved, and attracting international partners and audiences as a result.
Later, writer-director Adrian Chiarella recounted the way he and his team built Leviticus, a queer horror love story about internalised homophobia, shot in regional Australia, which has since found an unexpected spotlight at Sundance, with the subsequent distribution deal taking the film far and wide, aided by the decision to offer fans high quality clips to cut together themselves, creating an organic publicity machine.
Liz Doran and her collaborators on the Netflix adaptation of My Brilliant Career explained how they made an unmistakably Australian period drama that landed at number two on Netflix globally, reached the top ten in seventy-two countries, and scored a hundred per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.
The makers of Ina, a short-form web series born out of director Rachel Maxine Anderson’s disconnection from her Filipino identity (and written for her mum), premiered at Cannes before releasing on YouTube, also finding a broad audience.
Another panel observed that local hit Apple Cider Vinegar had travelled the world because it used the real life story as a springboard and then became part of an international conversation about wellness, medicine and truth, while The Artful Dodger (a character originally invented by Charles Dickens) had found an unexpected teenage fandom on TikTok and was now heading into its third season.
Decision-makers and authenticity
Screen Australia pointed to its latest research showing a robust public appetite for Australian stories, if people could find them, framing regional communities as both the source of those stories and an engine for the industry, citing The Dry as an example.
The streaming executives put the inverse bluntly: when someone pitched a show ‘for everyone from four to ninety-four,’ that meant the audience hadn’t been identified at all, with the honourable exception of Bluey. A better test was whether a nurse coming off a long shift would spend her scarce downtime on your show.
The commissioning editors for the various streamers and networks were unanimous about one thing; they are always looking for work that feels specific, truthful and surprising. Closely bound up with specificity is authenticity, which many speakers said was particularly important when it came to First Nations storytelling.
Steph Tisdell, reflecting on her own experience on the set of Total Control, described the quiet power of seeing Indigenous creatives genuinely cared for on a production, and challenged her industry to bridge its gaps and swallow its ego in order to do better.
The commissioner from NITV spoke of the primacy of First Nations voices and lived experience as non-negotiable rather than a decorative extra. The Mock Writers Room session made the same point in a different way, presenting professional note-taking and writers’-room practice as a real pathway into the industry for First Nations practitioners.
The team who rebuilt Miles Franklin’s historic story My Brilliant Career offered perhaps the sharpest case study: First Nations writers were in every room from day one, yet early drafts still felt like ‘two different shows’ until the team reframed the Indigenous storylines through the same love-versus-career prism as everyone else’s, rather than cordoning them off.
An Indigenous co-producer who joined the project ultimately pronounced the scripts ‘auntie proof’, with no trauma porn.
Running underneath these discussions was a conviction that authenticity is built through concrete choices; shooting on the real country, staffing rooms with diverse people who have connections to the stories being told, and bringing in community bridges to keep the work culturally safe even when budgets are tight.
Know who you are, know your project
This forum was also relentlessly practical about craft, and the need to understand yourself and your creations.
Asked about their origins, the TV directors Corrie Chen, Nicholas Verso and Kim Mordaunt traced their dramatic impulses back to childhood – learning English from 90s Australian television so that visual rhythm became a first language; growing up inside a monoculture of reruns and Hitchcock and becoming endlessly curious about what people won’t say aloud; using invented stories as an escape from chaos, only to discover later that grief and love are exactly what connect an audience.
The three of them were described as driven ‘to escape, to control, to belong.’ From there the directors got specific about method; how you get an entire crew to ‘see the same colour blue,’ how to allocate every sunset in a ten-week shoot to find the magic hour, and how a palette and a camera grammar can be assigned to each character.
The directors agreed that a good TV drama should make sense with the sound off, and that most problems in the edit are solved by removing clutter rather than adding explanatory voiceover. Kim Mordaunt, the director of Boy Swallows Universe and many other shows, said his key mantra was ‘don’t panic’.
With the announcement of the Regional Landscapes script-development awards, one judge noted that the winning writer, Agatha Ozdowska, knew her film from the inside out. This idea recurred among the television creators, who spoke of finding a voice through sheer volume of work, via journaling and lived experience, and finally through the discipline of writing what only you can write.
Adaptation
What makes a book worth adapting, one panel argued, is rarely its plot – which might sustain barely two episodes – but a confluence of character, world, idea and a big enough story engine to keep multiple subplots running. More importantly, it had to be something the whole team could still love five years later.
They were blunt about a market in which book options have become bidding wars regardless of quality, in which Australian titles with any heat are usually snapped up by American companies first, and in which a ‘built-in audience’ is a shakier asset than it sounds.
The real craft, these writers suggested, lies in inventing what the source lacks: writing a First Nations storyline into a colonial-era classic, building a five-year frame around a single figure rather than attempting a cradle-to-grave biopic, or treating the original book as scaffolding for atmosphere.
Their advice to emerging creators seeking to adapt was counter-intuitive – hunt the cheaper hidden-jewel book rather than the beloved classic (whose weight of expectation one panellist likened to making a Marvel movie), and make sure the budget matches the property’s real popularity.
The governing test for any cut or invention, another panellist offered, was simply whether you could imagine the original author writing it.
Funding bodies are not an ATM
Elsewhere, the forum was unsentimental about the business screen stories have to survive in.
A session on advocacy brought the writers’, directors’ and producers’ bodies together to map the pressures squeezing the sector; rising production costs, harder access to finance, and buyout-heavy deals that strip away the back-end revenue creators used to rely on, alongside live fights over AI and copyright.
State and federal funding agencies took the stage to be handed two hypothetical projects and asked for their best offers.
Their answers turned into a ladder of short-film development funds and production spend ratios, with a recurring reminder that grants, rather than loans, let producers keep equity in their own work.
The repeated advice from the government funders was for those with long term ambitions to write, direct or produce to get on to sets as crew, to treat the agencies as a testing point rather than an ATM, to look at newer mechanisms like the Private Investment Toolkit, and to build peer cohorts – even by running their own informal writers’ rooms to test ideas.
The streaming commissioners were equally frank. Platform literacy comes first. Executives said they routinely ask creators what they last watched on the service, and which Australian original specifically, because not having an answer signals you haven’t done the homework.
They said they evaluate against audience reach (new subscribers) and retention (existing subscribers), look for projects that complement rather than duplicate the slate, and – facing hundreds of submissions a year – will not fund a premise alone.
They decision makers said they wanted at least a pilot script, because the pilot is the truest read on voice and pacing, and beyond the page they are generally looking to back a whole team, with a realistic finance plan, casting ambitions, agency and international support.
The streaming commissioners from Stan and Binge said that championing a project internally – to marketing, business affairs, finance and senior leadership – could take twelve to twenty-four months. They said they saw themselves less as gatekeepers than as advocates inside large institutions, using audience data and quiet influence to push promising work through to the screen.
Their counsel to newcomers was to think of partnering with an experienced producer as a kind of matchmaking, one that protects rather than dilutes a distinctive voice, and to remember, as Kelly Vincent put it, that ‘the industry is an ecosystem rather than a food chain.’
Festivals
That same clear-eyed quality extended to a discussion of the film festival circuit, where a panel argued that a festival run should be a deliberate strategy rather than a hopeful wait for the top tier.
Build three tiers of targets, they advised; research what each festival has actually programmed; and don’t burn a year holding out for Cannes or Sundance, where the overwhelming majority of selected films arrive with alumni connections already attached.
Strong stills sell a film better than a blurb, publicity assets should be loaded before the festival invitation arrives, and a sales agent signed too early can price a small film out of the very niche festivals that would have championed it.
They were candid about etiquette, too – keep your short-film credits under forty-five seconds, never walk out after your own screening and ignore the other films programmed with it, answer the logistics emails, attend if you say you will, and steer clear of the ‘award mill’ festivals that sell meaningless laurels.
Dealing with rejection
Among the tough discussions at the forum, there was a gentler, recurring message about rejection, an inevitable part of any screen career.
Commissioners and funders alike gave the reassurance that a ‘no’ is almost always about timing, available resources or the shape of the current slate, not about the quality of the work or the worth of the person pitching it. Frequent rejection, they stressed, is simply the texture of the industry rather than a verdict.
The actress Teresa Palmer, in a career-spotlight conversation, gave that idea a human face, talking about resilience and self-soothing through long stretches of uncertainty, and about the years of embarrassment and risk that ultimately freed up her performances – from her beginnings as a film-struck Adelaide teenager and an extra on Wolf Creek to a recent, high-stakes Zoom audition which led to a big US role.
She also spoke about the nuts and bolts of naturalistic acting, grounding even weak dialogue so it rings true, tailoring her performance choices to the size of the shot, and leaning on a ‘yes, and…’ openness; using her fellow actors as ‘expanders’ who show you what’s possible and allow you to share their energy.
AI
Artificial intelligence, which is seen by some film makers as an existential threat, and others as an invaluable tool, was the subject of a session titled ‘Friend Not Foe’.
Producer and podcaster Kirsty Stark described reaching the edge of burnout while juggling projects, parenting and industry duties, and using AI not to replace her creativity but to reclaim her time and mental bandwidth – first by offloading small, repetitive tasks, then by building more elaborate systems and even a personal ‘second brain.’
She said she was careful to give AI clear boundaries, insisting on data privacy, on protecting creative IP, on acknowledging environmental and ethical costs, and on defining clear limits at both a personal and a team level. Her framing was that AI should amplify a clear human vision and its values rather than become a substitute for them.
AI was also tested in the real world by the Taste of the Tropics team, who used the technology to recreate a host’s voice after a medical issue left her unable to record narration ahead of a hard broadcast deadline.
Rather than hide the choice, they announced it on screen in an episode about technology, treating honesty as the better option when the alternative was losing the episodes entirely.
Mental health
That candour spilled into a broader conversation about wellbeing, leadership and the conditions under which good work actually gets made.
The directors spoke openly about managing their own mental health on set; knowing their triggers, engaging the team instead of withdrawing, and, in one case, meditating before dawn to ‘load the calm’ for the day ahead.
They said wellness coordinators and mental health resources should be treated as part of the budget rather than an unaffordable extra. (Screen Well Australia got a shout out.)
Teresa Palmer, as a performer now used to being number one on the call sheet, described good leadership as being about setting a generous, ego-free tone for the whole cast and crew, paying forward the kind of support she’d once received herself.
The My Brilliant Career team credited a deliberately collaborative, female-led structure and an open-door script department – where actors could feed in ideas and rewrites during production – with keeping their storytelling consistent and alive.
The television makers kept returning to collaboration as a survival skill. Compromise, one panel suggested, is the defining craft of the medium, and as the Taste of the Tropics producers put it, credits are a kind of currency, so the smartest thing you can do before chasing an opportunity is to assemble people who are skilled, trustworthy enough to be sent off on their own, and good-humoured about solving problems.
Choose collaborators whose values match yours, they suggested, and the rest gets easier.
What’s next?
In the closing session, a group of creators working directly with audiences described a landscape that is visibly blurring.
The local filmmaker Darius Devas, having given YouTube the last year of his life, framed going direct as a way of ‘taking your power back,’ while admitting that the real puzzle is the business model underneath it.
Joining the forum on the big screen via Zoom, the brothers Austin and Lachlan Macfarlane said they had gone from making effects-based videos as ten-year-olds to becoming editors and now full-time creators, with a large number of online followers.
They explained how they had deliberately built a funded web series as an anthology, so that the platform’s algorithm could use any episode as a front door.
The Ina team offered a sharp practical takeaway: they had clipped standalone, emotionally resonant scenes from their series and posted them across social platforms, and one clip – carrying plain, ‘what’s on the tin’ text so that a scrolling stranger instantly understood the context – passed five million views, with fan edits consistently outperforming traditional trailers and dragging a cold channel into discovery.
The wider point was that the walls are coming down, streamers are bolting on vertical scroll options, YouTube is behaving more like television, and, as one creator argued, Australia’s next wave is already emerging from online, powered by a shared hunger for creation models that don’t depend on traditional funding methods to stay alive.
By the time Screenworks CEO Lisa Rose closed the two-day gathering, the through-line had drawn itself. For all the practical detail about spend ratios and pilot scripts and festival tiers, the forum kept circling back to the same proposition it opened with: that the stories most worth telling are the specific, rooted, sometimes uncomfortably personal ones, and that these are precisely the stories capable of travelling.
Regional to global, it turned out, was not a slogan about overcoming disadvantage. It was a description of how the best work actually moves, and finds its audience.
The Echo will have a special feature tomorrow about IMAX pioneer John Weiley’s emotional acceptance of the Screenworks Lifetime Achievement Award, at the 2026 Regional to Global Screen Forum.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
