Darcy Conlan

AACTA, Sanctuary Pictures, Umbrella Entertainment and the Wake in Fright Trust today announced The Harvest, written and directed by emerging filmmaker Darcy Conlan, as the 2025 recipient of the Wake in Fright Development Initiative. Conlan will receive $30,000 in funding and dedicated development support to take the project toward production.

The Wake in Fright Development Initiative honours the legacy of Wake in Fright by supporting bold new Australian voices in genre storytelling.

A gripping blend of rural horror, cosmic unease and worker tension, The Harvest follows British backpacker Taylor Walsh as she takes a job on a remote Australian fruit farm, in hopes of extending her visa. 

Despite drought conditions, the farm continues to inexplicably thrive and Taylor soon discovers the presence of a sinister cosmic force. What begins as a fresh start spirals into a nightmarish revelation involving ritual sacrifice, generational trauma and something ancient embedded deep within the land.

Darcy Conlan is an award-winning writer and director from Melbourne/Naarm. His latest short film, Flappy, screened on the Opening Night of the St Kilda Film Festival (2023) and went on to win Best Short Film at Nocturnal Film Festival (2024) and Best Horror Short at the Berlin Short Film Festival (2024).

His music video work has screened at SXSW Sydney and earned awards at Fantastic Fest and the Australian Cinematographer’s Society (DP Wilson Huang). In 2024, he was accepted into Vic Screen’s Key Production Placement program. Since becoming a first round co-writer finalist for the AACTA Pitch Competition in 2020, he has continued refining his writing craft and is developing a number of feature films.

Established in 2008, the Wake in Fright Trust is an independent, not-for-profit collective that aims to honour and preserve the Wake in Fright feature film. The trust invests all received royalties from the film’s release back into the Australian film industry.

This initiative is also supported by Umbrella Entertainment, Sanctuary Pictures and The Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA).

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