Jewish-Australian story receives production funding for the first time

A Jewish-Australian film has received direct production funding from Screenwest and Screen Australia, a first since Screen Australia’s inception in 2008. Honoured as the West Coast Visions 2026 recipient, Perth-based director Richard Vilensky will receive funding for his scripted feature Everyone’s Having a Good Time But You, a story set in the Perth Jewish community.

Speaking to The AJN about the funding, filmmaker Vilensky and executive producer Jamie Bialkower, founder of the Jewish Australian Screen Fund (JASF) and Jump Street Films, felt it was a significant moment for Jewish storytelling in Australia.

“If you’d have told me two years ago when I launched the [JASF] fund that we’d be sitting here with Richard as the recipient of essentially the first Jewish Australian filmmaker … telling a uniquely Jewish Australian story, I would have thought that was pretty far-fetched, to be honest, because it has been an incredibly difficult landscape,” Bialkower said.

The West Coast Visions initiative, first launched in Western Australia in 2005, is designed to uncover, inspire and develop Western Australian filmmakers with distinctive voices, providing them up to $1 million production funding supported by the Western Australian government and Lotterywest. With Screen Australia’s pre-commitment of $500,000 in equity, Vilensky will receive a total of up to $1.5 million in production funding for his project.

For Vilensky, telling stories from a place of truth and honesty is crucial to his work, and this film is no exception.

“This is a film where all the characters are Jewish, and the setting is a Jewish wedding, and everything that happens plays out in a very Jewish context,” he said. “I’ve always written from my point of view … I think a lot of it has always been informed by my Jewish background, Jewish sensibility. You know, my heroes are the Coen Brothers and Spielberg.”

Inspired by Vilensky’s own experience at his sister’s wedding, Everyone’s Having a Good Time But You is “a story about a man and his family and his community and all of his problems”, but centred around the universal stress of weddings, financial pressure and small business ownership, told specifically and unapologetically through a Jewish lens.

While Vilensky has been developing the story since long before October 7, 2023, choosing to make the film now in today’s climate has given added purpose to the project.

“If you have reasons beyond yourself to do something, then that’s a superpower. You feel like you’ve got a community behind you … and you’re doing it for the right reasons, not just because of your own sense of career ambition,” he said.

Bialkower also reflected on the significance of starting the JASF and why government funding for Jewish storytelling is so important.

“We [the JASF] are actively trying to put more projects with different Jewish perspectives through the door, because I think it all starts with representation. But films need to be developed, they need to be funded, and they need to be seen … I’ve supported five films and television projects in the last 12-month period. Two of them have subsequently received direct production support from Screen Australia. Richard’s is the first.”

Looking to the future, Bialkower hopes that this funding will be a catalyst for more mainstream Jewish representation.

“I think, hopefully, we will be able to leverage the momentum not only from the funding of his project but also some of the other projects that are being developed … and hopefully encourage and inspire more Jewish filmmakers to say, hey, I want to do this – I’ve got a story I want to tell.”

The film is set to start production in 2027.