In Brendan Cowell's feature debut as a director, Ruben Guthrie, the title character is a hard-drinking advertising hotshot who swears off alcohol for a year. Cowell includes bits of business from the advertising world in the film, a milieu he says he knows well. "I started doing TV commercials as an actor when I was eight, I've been doing voiceovers consistently for 10 or 15 years, I hang out with those guys a lot, I've heard their conversations, I've been directed by them, I've watched them work." And he wanted the film to have an air of authenticity.

At its world premiere, on the opening night of the Sydney Film Festival, he was taken aback, when he realised that a prestige car that's a prize account in the film was the opening night sponsor and a venue name-dropped in conversation turned out to be the after-party location. "It looked a bit icky, didn't it," he says, cheerfully, saying that it was a complete coincidence. In the world of the theatre, he believes, products and ads can be fictional: in the play, Ruben makes an award-winning ad for an imaginary wheat beer for women. "But in the movie it has to be real, or you don't believe it." Ruben Guthrie opens in cinemas on July 16

DOCUMENTARY PLANS

Sixteen documentaries have been supported in a new funding round announced by Screen Australia. Almost $4.4 million is being invested in productions that have total budgets close to $16.7 million. The project with the most unusual plan for distribution is Mountain, directed by Jennifer Peedom (Sherpa), which explores the human fascination with the natural world. It is being made in collaboration with Richard Tognetti, artistic director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and will have initial screenings accompanied by live performances by the ACO, locally and internationally

MARTIAL ARTISTRY

Australian filmmaker Ivan Sen, who has just finished shooting his new movie, Goldstone, in Queensland, added another name to his already impressive cast list: the Hong Kong star Cheng Pei-pei. Cheng, who joined the shoot in the final weeks, was a luminous presence in some classic Hong Kong films. She trained as a dancer, was contracted by the Shaw Brothers studio, and first made her name in the legendary and influential Come Drink With Me, directed in 1966 by King Hu. In later years, she reached a new audience with Ang Lee's 2000 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, in which she played Chow Yun-fat's nemesis, Jade Fox. Her family lives in Australia, but this is the first time she has made a film here.

CROWD PLEASERS

The Sydney Film Festival has just announced the winners of its two audience awards. This year's feature crowdpleaser was Me And Earl And The Dying Girl, adapted by Jesse Andrews, from his debut novel of the same name. and directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. The film, about a high-school student who befriends a classmate with leukemia, premiered at Sundance. Australian audiences will have a chance to see it when it is released on September 3.

Second was Jeremy Sims' Australian feature Last Cab To Darwin, with Michael Caton playing a taxi driver with a terminal illness who sets out from Broken Hill on an extended road trip. It will be in cinemas on August 6.

There's a separate audience award for documentaries, and local films were the winners here. The most popular was Wide Open Sky, Lisa Nicol's film about the fortunes of an outback children's choir. In second place was Gayby Baby, Maya Newell's documentary following the lives of four children whose parents happen to be gay. Another favourite was The Lost Aviator, Andrew Lancaster's investigation of the mysterious life of his great-uncle, Captain Bill Lancaster, a saga from the 1920s and '30s that featured aviation, intrigue and murder and has already been the subject of a 1990 mini-series called The Lancaster-Miller Affair. The other films in the top five were The Bolivian Case and Sherpa.