Director Matthew Thorne’s independent Australian short film ‘The Sand That Ate The Sea’ to premiere tonight at 6pm AEST on Vimeo

Australian director, Matthew Thorne to release his highly anticipated short film ‘The Sand That Ate The Sea’ via Vimeo at 6PM AEST TONIGHT.

‘The Sand That Ate The Sea’ is an intertextual work documenting the South Australian red desert and in particular the lesser known Opal mining town of Andamooka, land that Thorne had known through family and childhood. The film challenges our understanding of community and grief; telling the story of a son confronting the memories of the mysterious disappearance of his father in a great flooding storm, while the same storm appears on his own horizon.

Says Thorne: “The film for me is absolutely an examination of how the sins of the fathers fall to the sons. How we live in the shadow of this great expanse of time, and within that veil are all the actions of our life and the lives around us. We are suffocated by that in some sense, and I think that is what the character James goes through. He is caught in the web of his familial experience, and unable to fully be alive because of that.”

Thorne’s preferred style of directing takes the form of docu-narrative, this meant embedding himself into the town of Andamooka and casting real members of the community to tell these intimate stories.

Says Thorne: “The goal is always to find a deep authenticity through working with as many of the local people as you can. We drew almost entirely from the community of people in Andamooka – and the few actors we did cast in came to live in the community for an extended period of time before we went to production. There is something that I think can only be captured in the nature of real people – and it also makes for an interesting challenge as a Director, pushing you to get performances from people who have never performed before.”

The project was undertaken over 4 years and is presented in multiple formats; narrative film, music video, photography, and installation. Thorne worked closely with long-time collaborator and renowned composer, Luke Howard to create the music for the film. With its contemporary stance on the mythic and spiritual connotations that come with the desert, the composer found himself writing for choir for the first time, recruiting Erased Tapes-signed vocal group Shards (who featured on Nils Frahm’s All Melody) and Australian-Israeli singer Lior, to create a fresh reflection of the desert’s minimal yet encompassing environment.

‘The Sand That Ate the Sea’ will be available to the public from tonight at 6PM AEST, Wednesday 29th April.

View the film here.

Matthew Thorne is an Australian film director, and photographer whose work is focused around the relationship between time, community, land, mortality, and spirituality.

His recent work includes intertextual film and photographic project, “The Sand That Ate The Sea” that explores myth, family and grief through the lens of Andamooka, an Opal mining town in South Australia; photography on Justin Kurzel’s feature film True History Of The Kelly Gang; photography for Nick Cave’s new album Ghosteen, and additional second unit direction and photography for Ridley Scott’s film Alien: Covenant.

Matthew Thorne currently lives between Berlin, Melbourne and Adelaide.

Matthew Thorne is a member of The Pool Collective, a pool of interdisciplinary creative resources that link vision to expression across all mediums.