Emile Sherman (b. 1972), film producer, graduated from the University of New South Wales before beginning his career with a documentary about his great-great-uncle Chatzkel, a Lithuanian Jew who lived through both world wars and the Bolshevik revolution. The low-budget Sample People (2000) made with a law-school friend and starring Kylie Minogue and Ben Mendelsohn, followed. His first company, Sherman Pictures, financed films including Rabbit Proof Fence (2002); Oyster Farmer (2004); Candy (2006) and Disgrace (2008), the latter based on the JM Coetzee novel and starring John Malkovich. In 2008 he founded See-Saw Films with UK producer Iain Canning; their early productions included the Greek-Australian comedy The Kings of Mykonos (2010); Oranges and Sunshine (2010), South Solitary (2010). In 2008 See-Saw co-founded the finance company Fulcrum Media Finance, which has since provided finance to more than twenty films including the critically-acclaimed Animal Kingdom (2010). The King's Speech (2010), which starred Colin Firth, Helena Bonham-Carter and Geoffrey Rush, reaped four Academy Awards including Best Picture as well as the BAFTA awards for Best Film and Outstanding British Film. Sherman and Canning received the Darryl F. Zanuck Producer of the Year Award at the 2011 Producers' Guild of America Awards. See-Saw's subsequent film ventures include Shame (2011); Dead Europe (2012), based on the novel by Christos Tsiolkas; the screen adaptation of Robyn Davidson's Tracks (2013); Lion (2016), based on the memoir by Saroo Brierly; and Ammonite (2020), a fictionalised account of the life of nineteenth-century palaeontologist Mary Anning. Having produced Jane Campion's television drama series Top of the Lake (2013) and Top of the Lake: China Girl (2017), See-Saw Films co-produced Campion's psychologically intense, revisionist Western The Power of the Dog (2021). It won numerous awards, including the BAFTA for Best Film and the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture (Drama) in 2022. As well as his involvement in his family's companies The Sherman Group and The Sherman Foundation, Emile Sherman is a director of the animal protection institute Voiceless.
Gift of the artist and Yanping Zhu 2022. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program.
© Adam Chang (Hong Jun Zhang)
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