Allanah Zitserman is an award winning scriptwriter and film producer, and founder of the Dungog Film Festival. Zitserman is also the director of Lumila Films.
Zitserman started the themed club Barbarella in the late 1990s when she was 18, only for it to become one of Sydney's popular nightspots at the time. At 21 she set up Screen Artists, a film development and production company with business and personal partner Stavros Kazantzidis. Her screen career started soon after graduating from UTS with a Bachelor of Business in 1998, when she took a production job on Strange Planet starring Naomi Watts, and fell in love with filmmaking. A year later, she produced and penned her debut feature film Russian Doll starring Hugo Weaving. It went on to earn her an Australian Film Institute Award for Best Original Screenplay. She wrote and produced Horseplay and event managed international functions at Marrakech and Cannes Film Festivals. She followed this by scripting and producing the black comedy Horseplay starring Abbie Cornish. Allanah then worked in script development for a few years in London, before returning to Australia in 2007. The same year, driven by her passion for promoting and celebrating Australian screen content, she founded the Dungog Film Festival - winner of Inside Film’s 2012 Best Film Festival Award. Zitserman returned to Australia in 2005, committing her time to both script development and spearheading Dungog Film Festival. She was awarded the Australian Film Commission's Writer's Fellowship in 2006. In 2007 Zitserman became one of the only two women to own a distribution company in Australia, the Australian Film Syndicate. From 2008 until 2012, Allanah created the script development program "In The Raw", which saw many of its projects produced including Last Cab to Darwin, Sleeping Beauty, Strangerland starring Nicole Kidman and Little Death. During this time, she also founded a film distribution company that championed local independent films. In 2017 Zitserman started production on the feature film, Ladies in Black, directed by Bruce Beresford. The film is released worldwide through Sony Pictures with Australia kicking off 20 September 2018. It has been critically acclaimed by Garry Maddox as a "love letter to Sydney".
Personal life
Zitersman arrived in Australia in 1980 with her family, as a Russian refugee. She lives with filmmaker Stavros Kazantzidis and they have two daughters together.
