Christopher Tuckfield

Christopher is an award winning Australian filmmaker making performative or hybrid documentary films, using many of the techniques of drama to create an engaged and reflective space for the audience. He is a graduate in Directing from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) and also holds a Master of Philosophy from Cambridge University. His films have screened at major festivals including London, Cannes Forum, IDFA, Clermont-Ferrand, Montreal, Sao Paolo and HOTDOCS.

Starting with Super-8 films his idiosyncratic and personal blending of cinematic forms has created a body of work in which the audience enters into the world, both internal and external of the characters of his films. Nothing is arbitrary, yet real events are often seen refracted through cinematic and performance techniques more usually linked with drama to allow a re-presentation through memory and the film medium of actual events.

The relationship of the individual to the world and of the mind to the world, is a recurrent theme explored in such films as ‘Plus ca Change’ (1991) about a maritime navigator who becomes a cinematographer, navigating the frame; ‘Flitters’ (1991) a short drama about two brothers secret world and ‘The Journey’ (1993) (lensed by Dion Beebe) about the life of a deaf-blind man travelling to Japan. ‘A breath’ (1998) is a near operatic account of a calligrapher and his partner surviving the 20th Century in China, including seven years in solitary confinement. Other films such as ‘Cenotaph’ (1994) deal with memory and the unresolved pain of the first world war in an Australian country town. ‘Renzo Piano –piece by piece’ (1999) is like a piece of music, combining philosophical musings of the architect with footage of 14 of his buildings, rendering the emotion of space through cinematic means, structured like a mosaic, implicitly reflecting on absence.

Chris’s most recent film ‘In our name’ (2007) continues his examination of the individual and society with a provocative, uncomfortable and visually stunning, dramatised essay on complicity, ethics and the world of modern torture. It has been invited to receive its International premiere at the 2007 Montreal World Film Festival.

Christopher’s films have screened at more than fifty international film festivals, winning numerous awards. All have been seen on Australian television (ABC TV and SBS TV) and have achieved in total more than one hundred international television sales.

His work is used in teaching programs at AFTRS and other teaching institutions and he has been an invited speaker at international film conferences including AIDC and Visual Evidence and a judge of the AFI Awards and Dendy Awards.