Co-presented with Overland magazine

Fill the Handmaid's Tale-sized hole in your life with this panel discussion. Drawing on MIFF’s Sci-Fi Retrospective and other dystopian works, including Ben C Lucas' OtherLife, filmmakers, film critics and authors invite you to join them in talking all things dystopian and post-apocalyptic, and just how plausible a Gileadean future (or present!) may be.

Panellists include Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Ben C Lucas, Claire Corbett and Jennifer Mills; moderated by Adolfo Aranjuez.

Alex Heller-Nicholas
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is a film critic on Melbourne radio station Triple R on the Plato’s Cave program, and a co-editor of Senses of Cinema. She writes books about cult, horror and extreme cinema.

Ben C Lucas
Ben C Lucas is an award-winning Australian writer and director with a background in game design and formal education in history. After working on games for Pinnacle and Warner Bros., Ben moved into screenwriting and won the What IF? Award for his screenplay All Flesh Must be Eaten. His debut feature was Wasted on the Young. His second feature,OtherLife, screens at MIFF this year.

Claire Corbett
Claire Corbett has been published in Re:Publica, Cinema Papers, Rolling Stone, Picador New Writing, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Monthly, Griffith Review and Southerly among others. When We Have Wings, a novel about humans genetically engineered to fly, was published by Allen & Unwin in July 2011. Watch Over Me, her second novel, was published by Allen & Unwin in May 2017.

Jennifer Mills
Jennifer Mills is the author of two novels, Gone and The Diamond Anchor, and a collection of short stories, The Rest is Weight. Her work has received wide critical acclaim and won numerous awards both nationally and internationally. In 2012 she was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian novelist. She lives in regional South Australia and is currently the fiction editor at Overland.

Adolfo Aranjuez (Moderator)
Adolfo Aranjuez is editor of Metro, Australia’s oldest film and media periodical. He is also subeditor of Screen Education magazine, editorial consultant for Liminal magazine, and a freelance writer, speaker and dancer. Adolfo’s nonfiction and poetry have appeared in Right Now, The Lifted Brow, Eureka Street, The Manila Review and Peril, among others, and he has edited for Voiceworks and Melbourne Books. He has worked with the Emerging Writers’ Festival, the National Young Writers’ Festival, Next Wave, Express Media, and schools and city councils. He is one of the Melbourne Writers Festival’s 30 Under 30 and a participant in the Midsumma Futures mentorship program. adolfoaranjuez.com