{"id":210546,"date":"2025-09-08T15:47:14","date_gmt":"2025-09-08T15:47:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/210546\/"},"modified":"2025-09-08T15:47:14","modified_gmt":"2025-09-08T15:47:14","slug":"worker-critically-injured-at-bassendean-engineering-firm-leighton-beach-whales-move-on-yung-filly-seeks-permission-to-fly-home-to-england-wa-premiers-new-laws-to-prevent-major-project-dela","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/210546\/","title":{"rendered":"Worker critically injured at Bassendean engineering firm; Leighton Beach whales move on; Yung Filly seeks permission to fly home to England; WA premier\u2019s new laws to prevent major project delays"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A heartbreaking documentary about a transformative music program in a South Australian women\u2019s prison has beaten off three highly fancied scripted features to win the $100,000 CinefestOZ Film Prize, the richest of its kind in Australia and one of the biggest in the world.<\/p>\n<p>Two Western Australian-made features, Zak Hilditch\u2019s zombie thriller We Bury the Dead and Zoe Pepper\u2019s cross-generational real estate slugfest Birthright, and the Melbourne time-travel rom-com One Last Shot impressed audiences at the Busselton-based festival.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"A still from Songs Inside, the winner of the CinefestOZ film prize. \" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/e2f400a5794beb93e8a72cdc54915eec5ef72f3ee9f64f18c5872fd1f5926eed.jpeg\" height=\"349\" width=\"620\" \/><\/p>\n<p>A still from Songs Inside, the winner of the CinefestOZ film prize. <\/p>\n<p>However, when the jury chair Frances O\u2019Connor stepped up to the mic at the weekend\u2019s climactic gala event the British-based Golden Globe nominee brushed aside the highly fancied features to announce Shalom Almond\u2019s Songs Inside as the winner of this year\u2019s CinefestOZ Film Prize.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cChoosing a winner from these four exceptional films was genuinely a challenging decision as each film brought something unique and powerful, and we deeply appreciate the filmmaking, and know how hard won any film is,\u201d said O\u2019Connor, a WAAPA graduate who herself stepped behind the camera with the Emily Bronte biopic Emily (2022).<\/p>\n<p>Songs Inside tells the story of a group of women in the Adelaide Women\u2019s Prison whose damaged lives have been turned around by their participation in a music program led by Barkindji singer-songwriter Nancy Bates, with their journey culminating in a historic performance \u2014 the largest concert ever staged within an Australian prison \u2014 featuring the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and an audience of over 200 inmates and special guests.<\/p>\n<p>Almond told the gathering at Sabina River Farm outside Busselton it was an honour for her team to be competing in such a high-quality competition.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSongs Inside truly is a testimony to the transformative power of music. Creating music and song inside prison fences brought light and meaning into such a dark place,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFor the incarcerated women involved in this project, music stripped away the identity of being a \u2018prisoner\u2019 or a number, it allowed them to feel like a mother, a daughter, a lover, a survivor or a leader again.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe camera was there to document the women\u2019s transformation around music, but soon many of the women began to use my camera as their own tool, almost like a witness or a trusted confidante to keep themselves accountable and prove to themselves that they could stay on track.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A heartbreaking documentary about a transformative music program in a South Australian women\u2019s prison has beaten off three&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":210547,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4740,50],"class_list":{"0":"post-210546","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-australia","9":"tag-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115169463082548882","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}