Even before Time’s Up became the call to arms for women around the world facing abuse, harassment and discrimination, two Australian filmmakers had joined forces in response to their personal experiences in the theater, film and television industries.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (the title taken from one of the most famous speeches in Shakespeare’s, Macbeth) is a provocative, compelling and relevant, 24-minute dramatic short that boldly examines the representation of women in contemporary culture, the significance of the stories we tell, and the personal cost of making great art.

The film was produced in less than ten weeks after writer/director Sunday Emerson Gullifer, who had spent years working at some of Australia’s leading theater companies, approached producer Alexandra George with an early draft of her script challenging perceptions of the supposedly privileged and glamorous lives of working actresses.

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It premiered earlier this week on Vimeo Staff Picks and Short Of The Week.

While she set the film in the milieu of a stage production, Gullifer was a student in the prestigious Master of Film and Television Directing course at Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Australia – one of only three women in a class of 12 – and so was equally aware of the injustices women were experiencing in the screen industry, which George was also too familiar with.

“I thought about the way men are so often elevated as geniuses, while women have to prove themselves over and over again,” says Gullifer.

Made in 2016, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow had its World Premiere at the 2017 Sydney Film Festival, followed by its International Premiere at the 2017 Telluride Film Festival, screening in the Filmmakers of Tomorrow program curated by leading directors Gregory Nava (Frida, El Norte) and Barry Jenkins (Moonlight), as one of only 16 short films selected from around the world.

“There was a sense that we were doing something right, but also a sense that Sunday was hitting something very boldly in the zeitgeist, which also happened to be very true for her,” says George. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow is a film that challenges the stories we tell and speaks to anyone who has ever had to walk away.”

Shot in black-and-white, it features performances from a caliber Australian cast, starring Matilda Ridgway (Cannes Palme d’Or nominee The Guests, Bell Shakespeare’s Hamlet), dual Helpmann Award-winner Mark Leonard Winter (Top Of The Lake: China Girl, The Dressmaker) and Charlotte Nicdao (Please Like Me, Thor: Ragnarok).

Following its Sydney and Telluride screenings, the film went on to win the award for Best Screenplay at the Munich International Festival of Film Schools and Best Performance in an Australian Short Film for Ridgway at the Flickerfest International Short Film Festival in January 2018 in Sydney. It has gone on to screen at other festivals around Australia ahead of its worldwide Vimeo release this month.

Synopsis

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a complex drama set in the world of a professional theatre company, following Lizzie, a working theatre actor playing Lady Macduff in a bold and visceral production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

When the play’s internationally successful auteur director, Helmut, pushes the cast beyond their limits, Lizzie is thrown into a dark and unacceptable world of onstage violence and brutality, causing her to question a life of commitment and sacrifice to her calling. It is a compelling, unsettling and triumphant examination of what it means to be a woman in a world that celebrates male genius.

All media and images provided by Debbie Kruger PR
Photo (above) by Michelle Leong