Winner of the Sydney Film Festival Documentary Audience Award, Martha: A Picture Story is Australian filmmaker Selina Miles’s illuminating look at a remarkable figure: intrepid American photojournalist Martha Cooper, known for her trailblazing documentation of street art and graffiti culture.

With disarming curiosity and a razor-sharp eye, Cooper became a champion of the underground. As a lone female intern at National Geographic, staff photographer at the New York Post in the 1970s and in her freelance work, she captured renegade street art, Japanese tattoos and American gentrification. The New York Times dubbed her 1984 Subway Art book the ‘graffiti bible’.

While Miles follows Cooper, rocketing through Berlin, New York and Baltimore, her adventures come to life with rich archival footage, tales from subjects and peers, and the electrifying photos themselves. This dynamic and exhilarating film uncovers a character as colourful as her extraordinary work.

“Eighty of the happiest minutes documentary-lovers are likely to spend in a theater this year.” – The Hollywood Reporter