Turning Around Perspectives
Genre-mixing filmmaker Andrew Undi Lee has been collaborating with four Western Sydney creatives to write a feature film with Co-Curious and set to premiere at Powerhouse Parramatta in 2025.
‘I think at the deepest core, my filmmaking and why I make films is that I want to chase that feeling of finding peace and being connected with people around me ... It’s very painful making films and TV, but there are moments of just pure bliss.’
In his internationally acclaimed short, Melon Grab (2017), the first film he made after graduating from the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) in drama directing, Andrew Undi Lee created a poetic romance between two teenage skaters on the New South Wales Central Coast. The film’s title refers to the difficult skating move of grabbing the board’s heel-side edge between the legs while airborne, and Lee’s feat was just as dexterous for a young queer Korean Australian filmmaker from Parramatta. ‘If you really have a love for cinema and storytelling, it doesn’t matter where you come from,’ says Lee, ‘so I think AFTRS was good for me in that sense; it brought me into a greater world of networks.’
The film, which lent an emotional tenderness (and neoclassical music) to this hyper-masculine genre, not only won Lee a slew of awards, but set him on an artistic trajectory that, seven years later, sees him at the helm of his own entertainment company, Turn About, creating film and TV productions in Western Sydney. ‘Turn About means to turn around 180, to go the other way, to change perspectives,’ says Lee. ‘Yeah, to be more radical and try things differently, to not follow the crowd and see what else we can do.’
Over the past year, as a participant of In the Room, Lee has been collaborating with four Western Sydney writers to create a feature screenplay as part of a special collaboration between Powerhouse and Co-Curious, producers of the critically lauded film anthology (2021). Set to premiere at Powerhouse Parramatta in 2026, the new film commission envisions life in a progressive multicultural city inspired by Parramatta, amplifying a multiplicity of cultural voices that call Western Sydney home. Lee sees In the Room as an important incubator in a wider process of allowing ‘people from marginalised backgrounds to have a voice in Australia – with the opportunity to tell their stories through their perspective. I think that’s a greater question that we have to address now. And so, one film may help push this agenda along.’
