Alex is an emerging filmmaker based in Melbourne, Australia. Since finding out his mother was an actor in China, Alex knew he wanted to work in the creative arts. Alex’s multicultural family drama, ‘Unsaid’, was awarded Best Short Fiction by the 2022 Multicultural Film Festival and received the North Bellarine Film Festival’s Emerging Filmmaker Award. It had its online premiere on SBS OnDemand. His last film, ‘Unseen’, a high-concept Sci-Fi with immigration themes, won Best Student Film at the 2023 Hybrid Genre Film Awards Australia. As a storyteller, Alex frequently explores themes of cultural diversity, fringe societies and familial connections. Alex recently completed his master’s degree of Film and Television at the Victorian College of the Arts and continues to make films from a deeply personal perspective.

“‘Unsaid’ is inspired by events in my childhood. I was a toddler when the Yugoslav war forced my cousins and their family into our small home in Australia. Suddenly, our living room became a bedroom to four people. I couldn’t understand what they’d gone through or what it must have been like to suddenly move to a place that doesn’t speak your language. It certainly brought its share of conflict. Three languages competed: Serbian, Mandarin and English. I had trouble keeping up and stayed non-verbal longer than most kids. I was still able to pick up on a few things; The grown-ups seemed angry a lot of the time, and sometimes I wasn’t allowed to go into the living room. I wanted to capture this sense of confusion in the film, which is why I didn’t add subtitles to the foreign dialogue. Most of the audience will view the family drama in a similar way as protagonist, ‘Oscar’ experiences it; only getting brief glimpses though body language and tone at what was going on between the family members. Just as in the film, things got messy in real life. A lot of that is still unresolved in my family today. In a way, I guess ‘Unsaid’ was a way for me to contextualise that time and my place in it. Oscar was able to find a way to transcend language and make a meaningful connection between all his family. While fictional, it speaks to the real love that existed there.”

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