Filmmaker Phillip Donnellon’s two-minute short, Bird in the Wire screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001. There, he encountered an Australian feature filmmaker, of considerable standing, who told him: “You can definitely get a feature up now, on the back of that.”

 Donnellon chose instead to focus on another short project, the result of which is the 13-minute Cheap Seats, starring Barry Otto. 

“I wasn’t ready [in 2001] to get a feature up, so when I chose to do another short, it threw a lot of people,” Donnellon said last week. “But talent needs to develop an arc of its own.”



Cheap Seats tells the story of Enjouèr (Barry Otto) an ageing clown who’s lost his place in the world, and who makes a connection with a young audience member (Tim Sheehan). The film was shot on 35mm with the Perry Brothers Circus in August 2004, with a cast that included up to 80 extras, elephants, camels and children.

 The $1,000 budget of Bird in the Wire is somewhat surpassed by Cheap Seats which clocked in at $90,000. While the film was initially rejected for government sponsored production funding, Donnellon used his Cannes profile to raise almost $30,000 in private funds to shoot the film. After seeing a rough cut, the Australian Film Commission (AFC) invested a further $45,000 post-production funding.

 How did he attract private investment to the project? Donnellon said that the Cannes win helped, but so did his straightforward approach to businesses.

 “I told them: ‘You’re not going to make money off this’. I told them they were contributing to an idea, a concept, a belief and a vision that will go on to bigger things,” he said. The biggest mistake a filmmaker could make, he said, was to give-up on a project after a funding rejection. “You have to be behind the film you want to make, whether you get funding or not. You find a way to make that film. You live by the sword and die by the sword.”