The country’s top screen agency is supposed to help people make content. But some producers claim it is deliberately trying to force them out of business.
At the Toronto Film Festival in 2015, English film producer Phil Hunt met a senior executive at Screen Australia. And according to Hunt – who claims to have invested many millions of dollars in more than 100 Australian films, mostly low-budget, since 2007 – the true import of their conversation has only just become apparent.
“It was on the ninth floor of the Hyatt, on the 11th of September, at 3pm,” says Hunt, who has both meticulous note-keeping habits and good reason to remember the specifics.
“I sat down with [the executive], and he said, ‘Now look, Phil, you lend a lot of money to these low-budget films, and we don’t like it. We think they’re taking advantage of the system, and the offset was not built for them’.”
