| Kyabram Free Press

Indie Birthday Trip flick finds own way to the cinema

When festivals and distributors overlooked his first feature film, James Robert Woods decided to get it into cinemas himself.

Hold tight - we’re checking permissions before loading more content

The Birthday Trip stars Luke Jacobz, Nicola Frew and Rosehaven's David Quirk, and follows a bunch of inner-city millennials to a luxury farmstay for a birthday celebration that goes horribly wrong.

After writing, directing, filming and co-producing the project via his production company, Badlands, Woods found he couldn't stir any interest from major festival organisers or the usual indie distributors.

But with small screenings at the Vision Splendid Outback Film Festival in the Queensland town of Winton and Sydney's Inner West Film Fest, he felt confident the feature would speak to cinemagoers.

Woods is convinced it's the right moment to poke fun at upwardly mobile millennials and says audiences so far have enjoyed laughing at themselves.

"The satire in the film is quite timely and loud but there's an irreverence and a self-awareness to it," he said.

So, Woods took the next step and launched a distribution arm of Badlands with co-founder Stephanie Jane Day.

They figured if cinemas needed audience data to take the film on, Badlands would collect the numbers itself.

Film distribution is usually the domain of big players such as Universal, Disney and Warner Bros. or Australian independents including Madman, Transmission and Umbrella Entertainment.

But Badlands' foray into taking the product to market is showing early signs of success.

It's held sold-out showings at Thornbury Picture House in Melbourne and the Art Gallery of NSW's Cinémathèque, with further capital city screenings planned ahead of a national cinema release at the end of July.

It's a can-do indie approach that has characterised the entire production of The Birthday Trip.

The film was shot on a shoestring budget around the town of Robertson in the NSW Southern Highlands.

It's a place that already boasts cinema pedigree as the location for the film Babe, and the town still has regular events dedicated to the talking piglet.

Shooting took place over just two weeks in 2023 using high-end camcorders and was funded by work on commercials and corporate projects combined with federal government screen tax offsets.

Indeed, Woods might best be known for his viral Stranger Things/Bondi Rescue commercial for Netflix involving unflappable lifeguards dealing with an otherworldly portal opening up on the sand.

Woods says he didn't bother competing for government film grants because he wanted the freedom that comes with independent funding.

"I think the traditional funding pipeline is sometimes churning out films that are not connecting with audiences," he said.

"What we've done with this film is tried to make something a bit more snappy."

Part of the difficulty in making and distributing an independent feature is that audiences tend to be sceptical of Australian feature films, Woods said.

"There's a lot of incredibly talented filmmakers and artists who want to create new things for the screen that are maybe a bit different to what we're used to," he said.

"But it's really, really hard."