MASTER OF ARTS (FILM, TELEVISION AND DIGITAL MEDIA) DOCUMENTARY, 2005
From 2007-2011 Grant Leigh Saunders produced over twenty half-hour documentaries, as well as music videos and other content for Message Stick on ABC TV.
Following his time at ABC, Saunders won the ‘Out There and Deadly’ emerging Indigenous filmmaker fund from Metro Screen and was able to produce an online sketch comedy series called Whiteblackatcha.
In 2015, Saunders was commissioned to produce a 2-part doco series for NITV, called A Flash Black? The Michael McLeod Story. He then co-produced his first independent feature length documentary. The autobiographical Teach a Man to Fish was shown at at Sydney International Film Festival in 2018, Byron Bay International Film Festival and on NITV, and SBS on Demand.
After winning both the UTS Excellence in Research scholarship and the Jumbunna Indigenous post-graduate scholarship, Saunders undertook a three-year creative doctoral research project and was successfully conferred as a Doctor of Creative Arts by the University of Technology, Sydney in April 2021. His research and creative production involved directing and producing a feature documentary on emerging Indigenous hip-hop artist Sonboy and looked at the music, history, politics and culture of The Block in Sydney’s Redfern. The forthcoming film is titled JustUS: Hip-hop and The Block.
Saunders continues to produce independent films and teaches Indigenous Studies at both the University of Newcastle and Charles Sturt University in NSW.
AFTRS HIGHLIGHT
Forming a long-lasting working relationship with editor Rowena Crowe, producing an award-winning documentary that took me to France, Norway and the USA, and winning the European Union Award to travel to the highly regarded documentary film festival, FID Marseille, in France.
CAREER HIGHLIGHT
Telling Indigenous stories from Cape York to Galawinku (Elcho Island), Redfern to Yuendumu to Alice Springs and many more remote and urban sites around Australia. And of course producing my first independent feature documentary, Teach a Man to Fish for NITV, which received an audience choice award at Sydney Film Festival 2018.