In 2008, feature documentary, The Oasis, shocked Australia with its gritty insight into the lives of homeless teens at a notorious youth refuge in inner-city Sydney. An outpouring of social and political goodwill followed, with the then Prime Minister pledging to halve homelessness by 2020. A decade later, with social inequality and homelessness worse than ever, the original participants reveal where their lives have taken them.
Sascha Ettinger Epstein is a documentary director/shooter known for raw, observational character-driven Australian stories. Her first film Painting with Light in a Dark World about underbelly street photographer Peter Darren Moyle, which collected various accolades, was the beginning of an exploration of beauty in darkness which has preoccupied Sascha throughout her artistic career. Her following films The Oasis, a longitudinal observational study of an inner city Salvation Army youth refuge, Playing in the Shadows, about an after dark basketball tournament for kids from a notorious housing estate in Woolloomooloo, and Destination Arnold, following two female Aboriginal bodybuilding women, have continued the same theme. Her most recent documentary The Pink House, about the last original brothel in Kalgoorlie, recently won Best Documentary at the Sydney Film Festival. Sascha has also worked on commercial television series such as Recruits, Kings Cross ER and Kalgoorlie Cops, and created advertising work such as 2020Vision, a global webisode series about the future of television. She studied Communications (Hons 1st Class) at UTS and later completed an MA in Documentary Directing at AFTRS. As an avid environmentalist Sascha also shoots probono for NGOs such as Bush Heritage Fund, Greenpeace and SurfAid.
