When Lianne Mackessy stepped onto the Tropfest stage – praised by judge Margot Robbie for her “absolutely pitch perfect” winning short film Crescendo – she looked every bit the overnight success that movies are made of.
But nothing about Lianne’s journey has been overnight. The reality has been a long and sometimes “uphill battle” – filled with people, places and life experiences that have helped shape her storytelling and her career, and one Lianne says she wouldn’t trade for all the awards in the world.
“I grew up in Albury, in regional New South Wales, I came from a working-class family, I had no connection to industry,” she says. “I was so far from anything industry-related, but I always loved stories and storytelling.”
Raised in Albury, she was the kid who stayed over at her friend’s home on drama days just for the chance to sit outside the studio until the teacher waved her in. Later, she worked whatever jobs she could find – cleaner, dental assistant, disability support worker, even grape picker – to fund acting classes in Sydney and keep her creative dream alive.
“I literally can’t even tell you how many jobs I’ve worked – thousands!” she laughs. “At the time it was all just a vehicle to pay for my acting classes … a means to get to the industry.” Only later would she realise how critical those early work experiences were, layered with characters, plots and pitfalls silently forming the foundations of her filmmaking career.
Her grit and determination is what propelled her from a young girl with stars in her eyes who thought the film industry was “for other people, not people like me”, to an AFTRS alum who this month beat out 15 other shorts to be announced the winner of Tropfest by Robbie, and co-judges including Sarah Snook, Taron Egerton and James Cameron. For Lianne, hearing her film’s name called as the winner before a crowd of 35,000 people was nothing short of “ecstatic!”.
From actor to writer, director – changing focus with AFTRS
Acting was Lianne’s entry point to the film industry. But waiting for permission, auditions and someone else’s “yes”, eventually got her thinking about alternate pathways.
“I was doing a bit of acting in the industry but you don’t have a lot of autonomy as an actor,” she says. “You’re waiting around for people to say ‘yes’ all the time. I didn’t like that. I realised I still loved writing and I wanted to create things for myself.”
Her love of storytelling had always been there, but AFTRS is where it took shape. In 2016 Lianne enrolled in the Advanced Diploma of Screenwriting, where she was introduced (by Stephen Davis) to structure, character, and the craft of screenwriting. Suddenly, writing and performance fused into something powerful.
“I realised my performance background was so useful … I could write really grounded and real dialogue,” she says. “And that’s where I was able to kind of pour all of my life experience into different stories. Everything always felt like it was a bit of an uphill battle for me. But then I realised how it had all given me a wealth of experience and just gold for screenwriting. I was like, ‘I have so many stories!’.”
Her writing skills then paved the way for directing, which began unexpectedly when Bus Stop Films (BSF) founder and friend Genevieve Clay-Smith asked her to tutor filmmakers living with disabilities. “That’s when I started directing my first films,” Lianne says, including rom-com Not a Wallflower that went on to screen at Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF). She was also selected for the MIFF Accelerator Lab in 2021, joining some of Australia’s most promising emerging directors.
At BSF Lianne wrote and directed inclusive film projects that have won awards, screened at festivals nationally and internationally, and been streamed on ABC iview.
Her films championed diverse storytelling, and she always worked collaboratively: “Writing stories about people living with disabilities, I did that in collaboration with the people living with disabilities. I would never just write, you know, on behalf of somebody. They are always completely part of it, so it is really facilitating for them.”
Lianne returned to AFTRS in 2023, this time to study a Master of Arts Screen: Directing.
In a male-dominated cohort, Lianne says the women at AFTRS changed her life.
“There were so many incredible female teachers that were so generous and really attentive to me throughout the course,” she says. She credits mentors like Megan Simpson Huberman and Hannah Hilliard – “I still have a relationship with them to this day” – with shaping her as a filmmaker.
Her final capstone film, Tuesday Tuesday, was ultimately made by an all-female team. “Working with a team of women was just so respectful and positive. In the end, we wouldn’t have had it any other way,” she says. Tuesday Tuesday was also awarded the Rebel8 Award for Outstanding Emerging Female Director at Flickerfest 2026.
“There’s no way I would have even been entering Tropfest without AFTRS. I, 100 per cent, wouldn’t have won without AFTRS,” she says. “Lots of my collaborators, the HODs, were from AFTRS too. I went there to find collaborators and I found them.”
Motherhood, momentum and the power of women lifting women
Lianne feels like she has unfinished business at AFTRS. She fell pregnant towards the end of her master’s degree and gave birth to her daughter Odeya the day she was supposed to attend her AFTRS graduation. “There was no closure [on AFTRS] at all,” she laughs. “I sometimes feel like I should be going back!”
Her Tropfest short, Crescendo, is deeply tied to new motherhood, creative identity and the pressure to return to work. It tells the story of a new mother whose babysitting plans fall through on the morning of an audition for a career-defining role. She wrote it when her baby was three months old, grappling with the pressure to return to work.
“I just thought, well, I don’t want to be out for a year and then go, ‘Remember I studied directing that time?’, So I just wanted to get something out there. Tropfest was the perfect opportunity.”
The film’s emotional climax – when the main character looks at her child in a pram and everything shifts – comes straight from Lianne’s life. In fact the baby in the pram was her daughter!
The film was described by its lead, Laura Bunting, as a “family affair”. Laura, who took out the Tropfest Award for Best Female Actress, also wrote the music composition and songs, while her son Everest plays a role and her partner was music producer and editor.
Lianne said she was so inspired by mums in the industry and wanted her film to show them that they can be “artist and mother and do it on their own terms”.
“Mums should be able to take pause,” she says. “And then they should be able to return whenever they want and whenever they’re ready and still be able to contribute and be accepted in the way that they deserve.”
She’s quick to name the women who showed her that was possible. Director Lucy Gaffy, an AFTRS alum with a young son, became a mentor and brought Lianne onto Teresa Palmer’s Mix Tape as a director’s attachment. “Watching the way she navigates her career … it makes me go, ‘OK, yeah, that’s possible’.”
The unexpected career Crescendo
Crescendo wasn’t the polished passion project Lianne once imagined would be her career highlight.
“You can make a film and spend years perfecting it and it goes nowhere,” she says. “Then you can slap together something with a really great crew … and then it wins.”
It’s made Lianne more optimistic than ever about the future of the industry and its accessibility to everyone.
“In terms of creatives being able to take careers into their own hands, we’ve never been in an age or a time where that is possible and that’s really exciting,” she says. “I think, if you’ve got tenacity and you do the work, then you can put yourself out there in a pretty incredible way and reach audiences without having to go through the traditional channels.
“You can grab a camera, film something, upload it … and they’re making shorts on TikTok now. There’s no linear way of getting into anything anymore.”
Today Sydney, tomorrow LA!
Later this year, Lianne will head to Los Angeles for an accelerated development program with major studios – her main Tropfest prize. “As a cherry on top, they threw in going this week to G’Day USA,” Lianne says, although she couldn’t make the whirlwind last-minute trip that would have meant packing and leaving her young daughter at home with no prior notice: “I would have loved to, but with a baby, I just can’t do that.”
But LA is locked in. The work is continuing. And the momentum she feared losing after giving birth is now carrying her forward. She’s excited for the future and where her non-linear journey will take her next.
Somewhere in there, she may want to slip into an AFTRS graduation ceremony, just for closure. But for a proud AFTRS community, the preference is definitely to leave that door open.
Watch Crescendo here:
Photos in the image gallery, on set of Master of Arts Screen productions Paralysis, and Tuesday Tuesday, by Monique Placko.
