TWENTY 20

Twenty 20 Pty Ltd was established in 1995 in Melbourne by Fiona Eagger and Brendan Lavelle. It was set up with the intention of creating a production company whose main aim was to tell stories with heart, that resonate with an audience. The company developed a slate across animation, features and television.

Twenty 20 Pty Ltd also consolidated the intellectual property from Fiona’s other productions Only the Brave (1994) and The Web Series 1 & 2 (1994). On forming Twenty 20, Fiona was invited to co-produce a major drama series for ABC television called Mercury, starring Geoffrey Rush. During this period development of The Way of the Birds (1998) and Mallboy (1999) started. The Way of the Birds is a 35-mm animation adapted from a children’s book of the same name. It was invited to many international festivals and won a host of awards. Mallboy was a low budget feature film that Twenty 20 had been developing for a number of years with writer/director Vincent Giarrusso. Mallboy was the only Australian feature film invited to the Cannes film festival in 2000 (Directors Fortnight).

During this time Brendan, personally shot over 200 hours of television drama. Twenty 20 developed projects for other production companies such as CoxKnight and Media World. The collaboration with CoxKnight led to Fiona being asked to co-produce the major television drama series Crashburn (2003), this time for broadcaster Network Ten. Crashburn was the first major creative alliance between Every Cloud directors Fiona Eagger and Deb Cox.

 


 

Mallboy

Shaun is a 15 year old enduring the turmoils of adolescence amid a chaotic home life with his mother and sisters. He hangs around with other kids at the local suburban shopping mall for want of anything better to do. Shaun has little reason to be optimistic about life. His teenage sisters are pregnant, his mum is incapable of providing the direction he needs and his dad is a petty criminal doing time. Shaun is disappointed again when his dad’s release from jail fails to result in any meaningful father-son relationship. Suffering from this rejection, Shaun has to decide how to make the best of it for himself - even if it means leaving behind everything he knows.

Format:   Feature Film
Genre:
  Drama
Length:
  90 mins
Year:
  2001
Producer:
  Fiona Eagger
Director/Writer:
  Vincent Giarrusso
Cast:
  Kane McNay, Nell Feeney-Connor, Brett Swain

Only The Brave

In the distance the petro-chemical factory belches poison into the night air and the midnight train screams through on its way to somewhere else. Alongside the track, Alex and Vicki are running and no-one is going to catch them now. This is a story about growing up – about dreams, reality and survival. Alex and Vicki are wild girls living on the edge: setting fire to hedges, smoking dope, hanging out at the old abandoned house. But they share a dream: to leave school and get out of this dead-end place. But the dream means different things to each dreamer and soon the rifts appear and begin to tear things apart. This is a tough and moving film about two Greek/Australian girls growing up on Melbourne’s outer western edge. It’s about a journey that’s made by only the brave.

Format:   Feature
Genre:
  Drama
Length:
  61 mins
Producer:
  Twenty 20 Productions
Director:
  Ana Kokkinos
Writers:
  Ana Kokkinos, Mira Robertson
 

The Web

The Web is a series of animated shorts, with each episode focussing on an endangered animal. The series is about animals living on varied habitats on different continents of the world and deals with their precarious everyday existence. Each episode tells the story of an individual animal, but also serves a specific function within the series, whether one of hope and cooperation or one of warning. The Web provides stimulating and accessible viewing to heighten community awareness of the need to conserve threatened species.

Format:   Animated documentary
Length:
  7 x 5mins & 6 x 5mins
Year:
  1994/1995
Producer:
  Fiona Eagger, Eco Productions
Narrator:
  Ruth Cracknell
Director:
  Lucinda Clutterbuck
Investors:
  Film Victoria, Australian Children’s Television Foundation, The Australian Film Commission,

The Way Of the Birds

The Ways Of The Birds is the story of a little girl who thinks she is a bird. She never speaks to humans, but dances and twitters and talks with the willy wagtails, ravens, magpies and white-plumed honeyeaters that visit her garden. And then one day she finds a dying eastern curlew in the backyard and her spirit is transported to the Siberian plains where these great wading birds breed and hatch. She turns into a curlew herself and eventually goes with them on their journey across the world.

When finally her spirit returns home, she wakes from her dreams and buries the curlew with the help of her mother and brother. The neighbour's kids who until then have thought her crazy, decide to join in and they work to create a haven which will provide a vital stopover for the migratory birds. Their labours bear fruit: One day an eastern curlew lands in the little swamp that they have created on the edge of their suburb, rests and feeds to regain strength for the rest of its journey. And the little girl finds the words to speak to her mother for the first time.

Format:   Animation
Length:
  24 mins
Year:
  2000
Producer:
  Twenty 20 Productions
Director:
  Sarah Watt
Writer:
  Sonia Borg, based on a book by Meme McDonald