Sue Maslin

Susan Mary Maslin (born ) is an Australian screen producer. She is best known for her feature films Road to Nhill, Japanese Story (2003), and The Dressmaker (2015), but has produced or executive produced more documentary films than fiction features. She is co-founder of the company Film Art Media, established in 2008 with her creative and business partner Daryl Dellora, based in Melbourne.

Early life and education Susan Mary Maslin The author of The Dressmaker, Rosalie Ham, also from Jerilderie, attended the same school, a few years ahead of Maslin.

Initially graduating with a Bachelor of Science from Australian National University and intending to do an honours year in zoology, Maslin instead switched to media studies at the Canberra College of Advanced Education (CCAE), after being attracted by the film posters in the building. Her only exposure to media so far had been as a member of the Women's Broadcasting Collective at the community radio station 2XX, but she gained entry as one of four full-time students at the faculty. The course had a focus on film history rather than practice, and she graduated with a Graduate Diploma in Media in 1983 after a year of study. It was at CCAE that Maslin met Daryl Dellora, her long-term creative and business partner, who was a fellow student in the Graduate Diploma of Media Studies.

Later in her career, in 2013, Maslin completed the two-year Master of Screen Arts and Business degree at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS). She did this with the specific goal of learning how to create a business plan in order to attract private capital and for a feature film, before producing The Dressmaker. The film was nominated for Best Documentary at the Australian Film Institute Award in 1992. A Senses of Cinema reviewer wrote in 2017 "in the eyes of this viewer, the film was able to capture something greater than the circumstances that surrounded Lionel Murphy during his lifetime".

Conspiracy, a 1994 documentary about the 1978 Sydney Hilton Hotel bombing, was produced by Maslin, and directed and co-written by Dellora.

She produced her first feature drama, Road to Nhill (1997), with director Sue Brooks and screenwriter Alison Tilson, which won Best Feature Film at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in 1997. She then produced and executive produced a number of Australian documentaries, includingHunt Angels (producer; won the 2006 Australian Film Institute Best Feature Documentary Film), and garnered the highest number of nominations at the 2015 Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) Awards, winning five including the People's Choice Award for Favourite Australian Film. In 2021 Maslin said of The Dressmaker that it was "the most exhilarating project I've worked on, as well as the most stressful" (she said that she had often referred to it as The Stressmaker at the time

She produced two documentaries about the life and work of film editor Jill Bilcock, both released in 2017. Jill Billcock: The Art Of Film Editing was made for ABC Television, and won an SAE ATOM Awards in 2018. Jill Bilcock: Dancing the Invisible which was released in cinemas, is a feature documentary film, directed, written, co-produced, and edited by Axel Grigor, and executive produced by Maslin.

Maslin and her company executive produced a documentary about Courtney Barnett called Anonymous Club. The film was directed by Danny Cohen, who had collaborated with Barnett on several of her music videos previously. The film premiered at the Melbourne International Film Festival in August 2021, and screened at a number of film festivals before being released in cinemas in March 2022. It was also broadcast on ABC Television, and is available on DVD.

The Search For The Palace Letters, a feature documentary about Jenny Hocking's legal battle against the Australian Government and Queen Elizabeth II to access the palace letters (relating to the dismissal of Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam), was broadcast on ABC TV in January 2024. she is deputy chair of Documentary Australia.

In October 2021, Maslin was a member of an industry group that developed the Australian Feature Film Summit, an online meeting to grow the success of the Australian feature film sector.

She is the founder and course leader of a Creative Leadership program, a workshop lasting two days, at Compton School, in Melbourne, "the first business school for creatives".

Awards and honours Maslin was the inaugural recipient of the Jill Robb Award for Outstanding leadership, achievement and service to the Victorian screen industry in 2012. In 2017 she was awarded the RMIT University Medal for her services as adjunct professor. Later that year, she was the recipient of the Alumni Excellence Award - Faculty of Arts and Design from Canberra University.

In 2021, Maslin won the Chauvel Award, which acknowledges significant contribution to the Australian screen industry.

Personal life Maslin is friends with author Rosalie Ham, with whom she plays golf.

Selected filmography