Asking 25 actors to take off their clothes for 25 days of on-set nude scenes would be a hard call for any film director.But Mt Warrigal filmmaker Adam Loughlin knows how to inspire commitment.Loughlin's debut feature film - The Girl Who Lived - will have its Australian premiere at the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre on July 31, but it has been a six-year journey for many of the cast and crew involved.
VIDEO: Watch the trailer for The Girl Who Lived Auschwitz: a chilling reminder of Holocaust atrocities Adapted from a successful theatre show written by Loughlin and Paul Quinn, the film is set in Nazi-era Germany and centres on a young woman, played by Wollongong actress Marta Fischer, who survives the horrors of the Auschwitz concentration camp.Filming on high-definition video began two years ago, with about 70 per cent filmed on sets at Coniston's Phoenix Theatre and the rest shot on location in Moss Vale, Goulburn and the Royal National Park.The volunteer cast and crew worked from 4pm to 4am to avoid work and study commitments and spent months taking part in trust exercises and workshops so the nude scenes could be filmed with ease.The trailer released last week hints that the end product will be confronting, with scenes of gas masks and piles of naked bodies richly shot and highly stylised in black and white with rare splashes of colour. There are 576 visual-effect shots in the film, while every line of dialogue has been replaced with ADR (additional dialogue recording). Loughlin is nothing if not ambitious: he created all this on a budget of $60,000. "What we really wanted to do was to make something that we could hopefully put out there on an international level as something that came from Wollongong and say we did the absolute best we could and we are never going to apologise for it," he said.For tickets to a screening of the film, email premiere@thegirlwholived.com There are 400 tickets available.
