Sophie Hyde


Sophie Hyde is an Australian film director, writer and producer based in Adelaide, South Australia. She is co-founder of Closer Productions at Glenside and best known for her award-winning debut fiction film, 52 Tuesdays.

Biography

Early life and career

As a teenager in Adelaide, Hyde learnt acting skills at the Unley Youth Theatre, where she met some of her future colleagues. She later studied film theatre at Flinders University in Adelaide and followed up at La Trobe University in Melbourne, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1988.
Returning to Adelaide based on funding supplied to make a film about women's toilets, in 2005 she re-met her now partner Bryan Mason, editor and cinematographer. Since then they have shared both a personal and professional relationship, both working out of their company Closer Productions in suburban Adelaide and parenting their child Audrey Mason-Hyde.

Work

Hyde and Mason started making videos for nightclubs and dance shows, then moved to documentary films. After becoming friends with choreographer and dancer Tanja Liedtke, they started making a documentary about her. After the dancer's untimely death in a traffic accident in Sydney in 2007, they completed the film and named it Life in Movement, which was named best work at the 2011 Ruby Awards for the arts, won the 2011 Foxtel Australian Documentary Prize and won AACTA nominations for direction and for best feature documentary.
Hyde completed her first feature film as director, co-writer and co-producer, 52 Tuesdays, filmed in Adelaide in 2013, then spent a year promoting it. This film earned many accolades, including World Cinema Dramatic Directing Award for Hyde at Sundance in 2014 and a Crystal Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Hyde's next project was a six-part TV series called Fucking Adelaide, commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Screen Australia, aired on national TV from 15 July 2018 and ABC iview after debuting at the Adelaide Film Festival in 2017. A dark comedy about "home, family, identity and the 'small town-ness' of Adelaide", each episode was a part of a story told from a different character’s perspective, including a character played by Hyde's child Audrey and also starring Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Brendan Maclean and Kate Box as three siblings who respond to their mother's request to return to the family home in Adelaide. Hyde has said that "It’s about the beautiful side of family, but also the negative side of being around people who feel like they know you, but perhaps don't allow you to change."; also that it reflects her love of Adelaide, which is greater once one has been away. The title started out as a joke, reflecting how Hyde felt about returning to Adelaide after being away — "both comforting and claustrophobic". Co-written by Matthew Cormack and Matt Vesely and produced by Rebecca Summerton, it was in competition at the Séries Mania International Festival in France2018, and screened in Berlin.
In 2018 Hyde made Animals, based on the novel of the same name by Emma Jane Unsworth, in Dublin. This was her first feature film shot abroad, and was screened in the Premieres category at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and as an Adelaide Film Festival "pop-up" event in April 2019.
In January 2019 it was announced that a drama mini-series called The Hunting would be screened later in the year on SBS TV, produced and directed by Hyde and starring Richard Roxburgh, Asher Keddie, Pamela Rabe, Sam Reid, Jessica De Gouw, Elena Carapetis and Sachin Joab.
In My Blood It Runs, directed by Gayby Baby director Maya Newell, produced by Hyde, Rachel Nanninaaq Edwardson, Larissa Behrendt and Maya Newell and made in collaboration with Arrernte and Garrwa people in the Northern Territory, had its world premiere at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto in April/May 2019. It follows the story of 10-year-old Dujuan Hoosan a healer and hunter, as his family try to give him an Arrernte education alongside the western education system.

Closer Productions

Hyde is co-founder, along with Mason, of the film production company Closer Productions. This is based in the Adelaide suburb of Glenside, sharing the historic former administration building of Glenside Hospital with the South Australian Film Corporation.
Other members of the Closer team are Mason ; Matthew Bate ; Rebecca Summerton ; Matthew Cormack ; Raynor Pettge ; and Matt Vesely.

Filmography

Film