00:01It's a funny price because you can't apply for it and so you find out about it via an
00:07email.
00:08I was in remote Sri Lanka filming so I found out about it late at night and once I figured
00:12out that it was actually real, it was kind of the job to absorb some life changing news
00:17immediately.
00:18A lot of us migrants come here with not much and our families lose quite a bit in the countries
00:26they leave and we had a war there and so we start off having to pay off the debt of
00:32our
00:32parents and our grandparents and to be an artist in Australia with that situation is
00:37kind of impossible and you keep on going and this prize means that you can actually sit
00:43and concentrate on your craft for the first time and feel like you deserve to have the
00:47job that you do and you can expand your horizons based on your ability rather than be limited
00:53by the situation life's given you.
00:55I grew up not knowing a lot about my family history and I think like a lot of people who've
01:00come to Australia you start to wonder what that history is in order to know yourself properly
01:05and learning about the secrets of my family's past has been life changing.
01:10My great grandfather tried to stop war happening in Sri Lanka, he was a politician and he couldn't
01:15but the tragedy of his story teaches us a lot about what keeps democracy alive.
01:19My grandmother in the ashes of his failure took our house from Colombo and Sri Lanka to Sydney
01:25like literally the staircase, the windows and rebuilt it in Sydney and my mum and I have
01:31inherited that and now my partner's a Maltese Australian and you know the way that migrants
01:37find solidarity with each other here and the way that she's kept our family afloat while I've
01:41been able to do this work is I guess what Australian stories are all about.
01:46For us to know that our families and our community stories matter on that global stage is really
01:52affirming and a kind of act of belonging and hopefully an excuse for more Australians to
01:58feel okay to celebrate what migrant communities have contributed here.
02:02I've been in remote Sri Lanka for the last 10 weeks filming in all the war torn areas there
02:08with the villages and the communities that have survived that and rebuilt their lives there.
02:13There hasn't been a movie of that scale in that part of Sri Lanka before and particularly the women
02:21have gone through so much and have rebuilt those villages and we've been spending a lot of time with
02:25them and their chickens and their goats and it was interesting because it really reminded me of
02:30regional Australia and what people have to do to survive working the land here and it was beautiful
02:36to make those connections between Australia and Asia and it's great for Australians to be
02:43leading that kind of process with our neighbours over there.
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