Sascha Ettinger Epstein is a documentary filmmaker known for her taste for dark, edgy Australian stories. She has won the AFI Award for Documentary Direction twice as well as other national and international awards. Her first documentary Painting with Light in a Dark World about visionary underbelly street photographer Peter Darren Moyle, which collected various accolades, was the beginning of an exploration of beauty in darkness which has preoccupied Sascha throughout her artistic career. Her following films The Oasis, a longitudinal observational study of an inner-city Salvation Army youth refuge, and Playing in the Shadows, about an after-dark basketball tournament for kids from a notorious housing estate in Woolloomooloo, have continued the same theme. She also made Wall Boy, a short drama based on a true story of a young male prostitute forced to work at The Wall. Sascha’s lighter moments include commercial TV series such as Recruits, Kings Cross ER and Kalgoorlie Cops, and advertising work such as 2020Vision, a global webisode series about the future of television. In 2015, she made the acclaimed Destination Arnold about two Indigenous women bodybuilders.
Tiburon International Film Festival
