It’s official! Cinema Australia is thrilled to let readers know the first Australian film announced to screen during the Revelation Perth International Film Festival is Jason Sweeney’s The Dead Speak Back.

Nominated for Best Feature at the South Australian Screen Awards recently, The Dead Speak Back will feature alongside other locally produced films – announced here soon – as well as a bunch of international titles including the critically acclaimed Tom Hardy vehicle Locke and Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin.

A stunning feature film debut from writer/director Jason Sweeney, The Dead Speak Back is a powerful, raw – perhaps even primal – journey into the experiences of the recently deceased and those left behind. Imagining the period after death as a transient moment in which the newly departed – in this case a youth – speak to both the void and those left behind. While the young man talks, his grieving mother is haunted by his presence in the space he has left in the world around her and in her dreams. The dance of reality and fantasy, and the movements of life and death play back and forth in this film that crafts a genuine surrealism that is both dreamlike and occasionally unnerving.

In The Dead Speak Back, Sweeney creates a world in which sounds, movements and gestures are as loud – maybe even louder – than words, and where connections even with the haunted dance of memory, however brief, are all that remains.

The kind of film made far too rarely in Australia, The Dead Speak Back is a haunting, beautiful and deeply affecting work that should stay with audiences long after the lights have been turned back on. More than this, it is a powerful testament to genuine Australian art cinema. Something that should be embraced and, given the high calibre of this work, encouraged.

Revelation Perth International Film Festival runs from July 3 – 13. Stay tuned to Cinema Australia during the festival for our chat with The Dead Speak Back director Jason Sweeney and producer Julie Byrne. You can find out more about The Dead Speak Back here.