By Callum Ludwig
Isaac Elliott was the filmmaker who took out the Warburton Film Festival’s ‘Show Us Your Shorts’ (SUYS) competition in 2023.
Mr Elliott’s short film ‘Don’t Come In Yet’ tells a comedic tale of a young boy in a wheelchair who wants to have sex for the first time.
Mr Elliott said it he really values regional cinema and that it was amazing to showcase the film, with the win being the icing on the cake.
“It’s a strange film I like to say, he’s been mollycoddled by his parents, his dad specifically and this is the first time at 18 that he is being left at home alone without his parents and just his girlfriend,” he said.
“It’s the perfect situation, but obviously it all goes wrong and it becomes an existential question about what it means to be disabled when you’re both considered a hero and a victim at the same time.”
Mr Elliott is a wheelchair user himself.
Mr Elliott said he has a tendency to reject a lot of content that revolves around disability even though it’s all very well-intentioned.
“Generally, even if made by disabled people, it is always in service of the narrative of changing the minds of audiences to see disabled people as something like brave or cool or sexy or something like that,” he said.
“I like to go into my films with that as the baseline now, to me it unlocks what’s possible because a lot of shows will see something like the sex as the endpoint, but for me, it wasn’t and I think the subtle shift in perspective is what the judges responded to really well.”
The judging panel this year consisted of Rebecca Bowman, Laurie Hastings, Ivan Gaal, and Maggie Sail.
Mr Elliott said it’s important to show disabled people that they are who they are and if they want to go out and get drunk on a weekend, then they have as much right to do that as anyone else.
“Disability stories can be inspiring or boring, they can be horror films, they can be sad, they can be anything because people with a disability can be anything,” he said.
“I want to get away from feats of bravery, physical effort or activism as the general way that disabled people are seen and instead just go for normal people, there are artists who are wheelchair-users, there are tradies and there are young people just being young people.”
One of Mr Elliott’s projects in the pipeline is to take five school leavers who are wheelchair users to ‘Schoolies’ and document the experience from the perspective of a wheelchair user because he feels in partying and clubbing culture that people in wheelchairs are often not considered as part of it.
Mr Elliott said the theatre in Warburton is an incredible one.
“I think that it’s really important that these theatres continue to run in regional Australia and although Warburton is technically not regional it’s still almost a two-hour drive to the city,” he said.
“It’s nice that they have something and that goes for every small town around Australia, having a cinema is really important.”
