Writer, director, producer, collaborator Tanya Modini has received her second Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) award nomination for her short film And the Ocean Agreed. This nomination follows up on her deserved nomination in 2022 alongside fellow filmmaker Luisa Martiri for their powerful short film The Moths Will Eat Them Up.
And the Ocean Agreed features the luminous Chrissie Page as Vina, a grandmother who is living with advanced stages of dementia. Vina lingers in the shadowy aged care facility, unaware of the banal entertainment forced upon her. When her daughter, Morgan (Jacy Lewis) and her granddaughter Evie (Jazz Zhao) come to visit, Evie decides that it’s time to take Vina down to the place where she spent most of her youth as a swimmer: the ocean.
When the family arrives at the ocean, Vina finds herself in a moment of lucidity, conscious of her past, present, and what her future holds. The ocean reawakens her, and in some of the films most joyous moments, we see Vina swimming alongside a younger version of herself (Flossie Smith). The consciousness that emerges from within Vina then raises a further question about her state of being: is living with dementia really the way that she wants to live the rest of her life? And, if not, is there an alternative?
And the Ocean Agreed is another considered production from Tanya Modini, who across two short films has created a predominantly women-led crew who collectively tell stories about women. Where Moths was a film about the looming presence of violence in the streets and on public transport, Ocean is quieter, more tender affair, considering the role of motherhood, and maybe more importantly, the role of daughters and granddaughters in the lives of their grandmothers as they age. There’s a genuine love, affection, and admiration for this motherly connection that’s underpinned by three considered and gentle performances.
In the following interview, Tanya talks about the inspiration for the story, how important it was to imbue the film with connection points for audiences to hold onto, and the need to support short filmmakers in Australia. Tanya also talks about the unexpected educational life that the film has taken on.
And the Ocean Agreed is nominated for Best Short Film at the 2025 AACTA Awards. Winners will be announced on 5 February 2025.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Can you talk about what inspired you to tell this story?
Tanya Modini: I guess it all comes back to a very close friend of mine whose mother was living with advanced dementia in care. I was walking along the beach and talking to her one day about [that experience], and she was telling me how music had given her mother bits of her memory back. If they played music to her that was from her younger days, she'd be able to sing along with it. Because we were at a beach, I was thinking, ‘I wonder, if you took somebody back to a place they loved, like if they were an ocean swimmer, would they get their memory back to some capacity?’ That's where it all kind of started rolling from.
I really wanted to show end of life choices, and I wanted to have a look at a concept based around if somebody was in advanced dementia and they got a window, just for a moment, into the life they were living, and they could make a choice around it – a choice that they can't make once they're in the state of advanced dementia – a what would they do?
I also wanted to pose that question to audiences: if that was you, what would you do?
Then there is the notion of a multi-generational family. Can you talk about the importance of being able to see a granddaughter, her mum and grandmother, getting to experience this journey together?
TM: With dementia or any sort of chronic illness within a family, it doesn't just impact the person who's dealing with it. It impacts the whole family. So, I wanted to show the different ways in which the family members were dealing with it, in particular, the daughter of Vina who is very worried and shut down and just trying to get through the basics of life around her care. When her granddaughter, the breath of fresh air, comes in she's like, ‘Well, let's just take her and get her out of here.’ That was her way of dealing with it. ‘Let's take her back to something that she's always known and that might give her some sort of joy in this horrible existence.’ An existence where entertainers are put in front of her and that she doesn't even have any control of over.
I appreciated the agency that you give the granddaughter. So many families have been in a similar situation, and often the parents are the ones who decide what takes place, but there is a level of agency that the granddaughter has here where she is clearly a deciding force saying, “No, this is what my grandmother wants. This is what she wants to be able to do.” How important was it to show that level of agency?
TM: It's very important to me. This is a concept for a feature film, and within the feature film, the grandmother and the granddaughter have an extremely close relationship, and the mother is not terribly involved, because she's off on a tangent, disagreeing with some lifestyle choices of the granddaughter. I really wanted to show that connection between the granddaughter and the grandmother in the film, along with the agency of the granddaughter, just by virtue of what the story in the feature film will be like.
This is a film about seeking those connection points, and the vivid realisation of that here makes it feels like it is a possibility for a lot of people. Are you hoping that audiences will take away an understanding that while your family member may have dementia, you can still connect with them?
TM: Oh, absolutely. Using that music, particularly in the car where the granddaughter's singing to the grandmother, and then when they get to the beach and she gets her memory back, she sings it back to her; I was trying to say that she may have seemed like she wasn't present, but she was there all along.
I think as people get older, and particularly with dementia, we tend to disregard what they might be thinking about or disregard them as the person they used to be. Another friend of mine whose mum was in care was finding that with the staff. What she did is she took a photo of her mum as a young woman and put it up against the bed so that when the staff came in, they could go, ‘Oh, okay, so this is who she was/is.’ Perhaps that will change the perception of how elderly people get dealt with, because there is a bit of a lack of respect there and in the way that our community treats them overall. Hopefully it's getting better.
That leads me to talk about Chrissie Page, who is so wonderful here and carries such a vibrancy. Can you talk about working with her and building Vina as a character with her?
TM: Chrissie is a seasoned professional. She was remarkable to work with. She researched people with dementia and their movements. You can see as she's walking down the beach while she is still under the influence of dementia, she's moving very rigidly, and then when she comes out, after she has a memory back, everything's freed up, along with her face and her expression; not just her expression, but her entire body. She is somebody who brings a lot of joy. She's an incredible actor, amazing to work with, and just a joyful person to be around. I think she did a phenomenal job playing Vina.
There's the tactile nature of being in the ocean where you can see her coming to life in those moments. It's beautiful.
Can you talk about the difference of shooting in the confined train carriage of Moths and then moving into this open area, the wild environment, of the ocean here?
TM: The train carriage was complicated because we had to make it look as if it was moving. We had to have all that incredible lighting that went on around the carriage. But we were in a sealed and contained environment, so whatever was going on out in the big, wide world of Mother Nature didn't impact us.
But this was a whole different story. Julian Panetta, who's the DoP on this, is incredible and gets really hands on with the post. He and I became obsessed with weather apps in the lead up to the shoot, and what we learned is that weather apps don't know anything because Mother Nature will do what Mother Nature does on the day. And unfortunately, on that particular day, it was horrendous. We were hoping to get the underwater shots in the ocean, because Mooloolaba, where it was shot, on a fantastic day is crystal clear; you have a reef, you can see fish, and all that sort of stuff. But there was a massive weather event. It was a huge swell, and the water was really murky. So, we had to shoot in very shallow water there and try and make it look as if it was deep. We only got four hours of shooting in because the weather was so bad.
Luckily, the parents of the young girl, Flossie Smith, who has the role in the film, had a pool. So we had to improvise. We went to her pool at night and lit it all up and put the actors in 15-degree water. There was a window of about 90 seconds where Chrissie and Flossie could be in the water before we'd have to get them out, warm them up, give them a cup of tea, sit them out for half an hour and put them back in again. It was a lot of improvisation, but we got there in the end.
I understand you also have predominantly women-led crews too. Can you talk about the importance of that as someone guiding a production like this?
TM: Most of the people who worked on Moths came back for this one if they weren't already working on something else. We're really starting to get a cohesive team that we can take forward into features and series moving forward. It's all working very well with this team. They're all Brisbane based people. Louisa Martiri is now living in Sydney, but she's still an integral part of the team.
The women aspect is really important to me. I come from a background of working in the police and working in domestic and family violence, so my focus on women's stories springs out of my experience via that. Given that they are stories about women, it seems perfect to me to have most of your cast and crew as women. We make Julian an honorary woman for these events.
It's incredibly important to have the same people backing you up. It's so much easier once you get a working relationship with everybody. You get to know amazing, incredible production designers like Liv Hutley, who did a fantastic job on the set and the costume design. Everybody's keen. This team was so passionate. That was a terrible day at the beach, and everyone was still happy and laughing and trying to be as professional as possible because they believed in what we were trying to create. I had to take them all forward and with me in whatever comes next.
Let's talk about getting short films off the ground in Queensland. What are the avenues of trying to get something up in a short format there?
TM: It's virtually impossible unless there's an initiative going. I was incredibly fortunate that Moths got picked up by the RIDE Shorts initiative back in 2021. But unless there is an initiative on, there's absolutely no pathway for filmmakers to get shorts made unless they self-finance or run a crowdfunder online, which you really can't hope to get more than about ten grand if you crowdfund, so you can't do anything huge.
I'm a big believer in paying people. I really don't like to make stuff and go, ‘Hey, can you do this for free?’ I'm happy to do it for free, but when I'm bringing a short cast and crew on, I really want to make it worth their while and actually give them some money.
At the moment Screen Queensland don't have any short film pathways, which is a shame. I understand there's other focuses they have, but I'm not sure whether any state does.
In order to get a pathway to get a feature up, they want to see some shorts that you've done. So, if you're a student, or if you're somebody who lives in a low socioeconomic situation, then you don't have a cool twenty grand to throw at a short film. You're flat out buying a loaf of bread for the day, but you might have an amazing idea for a short film, and you might be super talented, but if that pathway is shut down, no one's going to look at you for a feature film, because they don't know if you're capable or not. It's a real shame.
I think the focus has gone to online, which is great, and I understand why that's happening, but we've still got to create pathways for our young filmmakers coming up with short films, or we're not going to hear from them again.
I know that this is a proof of concept short, but it stands as itself as a powerful short film. It is a shining example of what the short film format can do. Even if this never becomes a feature, it is still a valid film in itself. That's what frustrates me about not having those paths to funding or support for shorts, because how else can you test whether a story is going to work or whether it's in an interesting concept?
TM: Or build up a team over a few shorts. That's what we've managed to do. But how do you do that? If you don't have the funding, and because not everyone works for free, you just can't do it. It's a real shame. I honestly believe we're losing a lot of a lot of homegrown talent that just goes, ‘I can't do this. I don't have the money. I don't have the time. I've got to get money from paid work somewhere. I can't do this because there's no financial pathway to it.’
It is huge amount of energy as well. It's so frustrating. While I don't expect that I'm able to change anything, I certainly hope that the more that I talk about the difficulties of it with people like yourself, hopefully something might happen in the future. Who knows?
TM: It's frustrating. I'll be flying the flag for it. I like to bring it up wherever I am, because it doesn't make any sense to me. If the screen agencies took $200,000 a year, which, when you look at the amounts of money that are going into overseas films at the moment for post-production, is not much, they could say, ‘Okay, we're going to contribute ten lots of $20,000 in this initiative, or a rolling fund throughout the year to young or emerging filmmakers.’ Sure to goodness it's not that hard. It doesn't seem like that much to provide.
I agree completely. Australia has had shorts go on to get Oscar nominations too. And then, of course, there's the AACTA Award nominations. This is your second nomination. Here is a self-funded film getting recognised by the national awards body. That's a huge achievement. Can you talk about the importance of being able recognised in a field that is so difficult to get things off the ground?
TM: Oh, absolutely. That's why we didn't ever expect to get a nomination for this. The AACTAs are about who you know and whose eyes you can bring to your film on AACTA TV, so if you've been funded through Screen Queensland or a big production company, you know that the likelihood of getting eyes on your film is much greater than if you're pushing out a self-funded film. We had a bit of a strategy with the cast and crew and got together for a bit of a meeting, and strategically planned out what we might do in a social media campaign and reaching out to individual people we knew via email, and they jumped on board, and everybody contributed. And we did get some traction because we got a nomination. We were surprised, but very, very excited by that.
Can you talk about the scope of festivals that you have been able to screen in too. What does it mean to be able to screen your film, an Australian story, internationally?
TM: Oh, it's massive. This film went down incredibly well in the United States. The United States really liked it. It had its world premiere at Dances with Films in LA back in June 2024 and from there it visited various parts of the US before it premiered in Australia at BIFF (Brisbane International Film Festival).
But, the exciting thing that's happened is that it screened at the San Diego International Film Festival, which is quite a significant festival over there, and from there, it's now being fed into schools and universities throughout California through an initiative[i] with San Diego for students to watch the film and unpack what the issues within the film and talk about it as an educational tool. That's incredible. I mean, it's great to have films in cinemas, but my goodness, there's other pathways for them as well where they actually have impact. We're very happy that it's in schools in California, that's such an exciting thing as well.
As you're saying, there are different lives that a film can have. Did you know that that was a possibility with the film?
TM: No, not at all. They only seem to have a handful of films there, and they approach you after the end of the festival and ask if you want to be involved in it, and then they interview you. That whole package of your film and the interview goes with it to the schools. We had no idea. It was really exciting and I'm really happy about that.
As you should be. Do you have any other anecdotes or stories have you heard from audience members about their response to the film that has kind of left a mark on you?
TM: Poor Chrissie gets lots of people coming up to her crying after screaming. Everybody's got a family member who they watch go through dementia, so it does touch everybody; some more profoundly than others. So, we predominantly have a lot of people coming up to us after screenings talking about their family member that the film reminded them of, and becoming quite emotional about the film and how it brought back memories from their family member and that sort of thing. It's predominantly emotional reactions that we get afterwards. Chrissie gets lots and lots of hugs that she has to deal with.
Finally, talking about that emotional connection is such an important one as it leads into talking about the need to build awareness of the lives of people living with dementia. What conversations with their family do you want people to be able to have from this going forward?
TM: It's really important to have an advance care plan. This is a much bigger situation about voluntary assisted dying, but I think it's also an important conversation for governments to start thinking about. I know that once you have a dementia diagnosis, you don't get the opportunity to partake in that if you want to. I totally understand the complications around that; I really and truly do. But I'm hopeful, as I think some of the other agencies that deal with voluntary assisted dying are pushing for more research and discussions around that area, although that is a tricky road. It's a very, very tricky road.
For me, personally, if I got a little glimpse into my life, and if it was as Vina was living, I know which choice I would make, and it would be the same as she did.
[i] The FOCUS on Impact Education Program at the San Diego International Film Festival: https://sdfilmfest.com/education/