VACANT POSSESSION
Australia / 1994 / 95 min / DCP / Drama

Directed by Margot Nash

Script : Margot Nash
Cinematography: Dion Beebe
Editing : Veronika Jenet
Music : Alistair Jones
Production : John Winter
Digital restoration : Piccolo Films

Cast : Pamela Rabe, John Stanton, Toni Scanlan, Linden Wilkinson, Rita Bruce

Jury mention, Créteil Festival (FIFF), 1996

Following her mother's death, Tessa returns to her childhood home, a house haunted by emotional secrets. But how to return home after all those years away? And what’s home after all… a house… a place… a family? A story of two families – one white one Aboriginal – both living in the shadow of the past. A past fragmented by events too long unresolved. Weaving dream, memory, fantasy, past and present, Vacant Possession is a story of conflict and the complexities of reconciliation.

Margot Nash

Margot Nash is a filmmaker, photographer and academic. Her film credits include the award-winning feature dramas Vacant Possession (1994) and Call Me Mum (2005) both have been selected at the Festival des Antipodes (Saint-Tropez), the experimental shorts Shadow Panic (1989) and We Aim To Please (1976) and the feature documentaries For Love Or Money (1983) and The Silences (2015). She has worked as a consultant and mentor for Australian Indigenous filmmakers and worked in the Pacific running documentary workshops for Pacific Island women producers. Her 2015 personal essay documentary The Silences screened nationally and internationally and in 2016 she won an Australian Writers’ Guild AWGIE Award for the screenplay. In 2019 she collaborated with performance artist Victoria Hunt to make the award-winning short film Take and in 2021 she exhibited a series of photographs called Songs for Gaia. In 2023 she made the short film Undercurrents: meditations on power which screened at the Warsaw International Film Festival, MIFF and Festival des Antipodes (Saint-Tropez) in France. She is currently a Visiting Fellow in Communications at UTS. See: https://www.margotnash.com