The Australian film EIGHT by Peter Blackburn won the 2016 Grand Prix award at the eighth annual 'One Take' Film Festival in Zagreb, Croatia.
The story of the films is interesting, challenging and significant. The main character Sarah Prentice, played by Libby Munro, is a sufferer of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and agoraphobia meaning that she has to perform certain activities repeatedly.
Sarah repeats her every ritual an eponymous 'eight' times and can’t leave her house. She wakes up one morning and tries to get out of the house, but it is quite no simple task given her mental condition.
According to SANE Australia about 450,000 Australians suffer from OCD at some point in their lives. However, according to Peter Blackburn, director/writer of EIGHT, the representation of this condition in media can be rather "light hearted".
"People don’t really understand how dramatic it can actually be," Blackburn told SBS Croatian Radio this week.
"We started to investigate into the causes and we came up with the story’.
It's not just the tricky subject matter that makes EIGHT interesting but the fact that it was all filmed in one single take.
Blackburn explained: "We kept the camera rolling the entire time, there is no cut within the film, it is one continuous filming of the action for 81 minutes."
On how they managed to pull off this incredible feat, Blackburn says, "you need a very skilled director of photography to get the right amount of coverage for the film to tell the story effectively".
Watch the trailer below:
Filming a 81-minute long shot without cutting is also particularly challenging for the lead actor. Aussie star Libby Munro explains the experience of remaining present throughout the whole thing.
"It was the single most challenging role I’ve ever had," she says of the single long take. "Because I had to sustain the character which was heavily based on anxiety and physically enacting the compulsions, that generated energy within me to create more and more anxiety in my body."
"When you are staying in the character for that long, the anxiety starts to affect you physically and mentally and there’s less acting but it is happening to me in a way. That benefits the character and the performance."
Blackburn, together with his producers, sourced many talented Queensland filmmakers to take part in the production of this minimalistic and suggestive Australian drama.
Listen to the full interview with Peter Blackburn by SBS Croatian Radio here:
