Blasting from the screen like the cinematic progeny of some unholy union between Lars Von Trier and Abel Ferrara, here is uncompromising Australian 'underground' filmmaking at its very best - an in-your-face, innovative and compelling drama about police corruption in Victoria.

Constructed as a series of snapshots of the Homicide, Vice and Drug squads, Redball is a grimly humorous descent into the psychoses of frontline policework. We follow the story of Detective J.J. Wilson (Belinda McClory), a Melbourne Homicide cop determined to bring a child killer to justice. She will not let anything stand in her way - including the law. Fast moving and dialogue driven, the story unfolds in a scatter-gun narrative structure of self-contained scenes that are by turns confronting, hilarious and disturbing.

An outstanding ensemble of Melbourne actors have been brought together including Belinda McClory (The Matrix), John Brumpton (Dance Me to My Song, MIFF 1998), Robert Morgan (Life, MIFF 1996) and Paulene Terry-Beitz (Janus). Cinematographer Mark Pugh creates an aggressively slick style and editors Alan Woodruff and Cindy Clarkson throw away the rule book for this, maverick writer/director Jon Hewitt's expose of an aberrant police culture festering away in our own backyard. Fittingly, Redball has its World Premiere in the city that inspired it.

Jon Hewitt is a guest of the Festival.

Jon Hewitt's first feature, the 1991 exploitation film Bloodlust, is notorious as being the only Australian film ever to be banned in Britain, and was named by Film Threat magazine as "Australia's most successful cult movie". Redball is Hewitt's second feature as writer/director.