KEWL Studios are excited to finally lift the veil on their debut mini series, Sex & Death. Released online today, Sex & Death follows aspiring but hopeless actress Charlie and her lost cause attempts at romance. Produced by Tobias Willis (Now Sound 2018) and starring Actor, Writer and Director Kathleen Lee (Bush Trip 2016) as the protagonist, the six-part comedic web series explores relationships, virtue, self-discovery and self-expression in a semi-autobiographical exploration into the neurodiverse life and brain of Kathleen Lee.
Following the immediate success of the 2018 Melbourne International Film Festival documentary premiere Now Sound: Melbourne’s Listening, Producer Tobias Willis has cemented himself as a leading creative force within the Melbourne film industry and beyond. Establishing a formidable career across music and the arts, Tobias founded his own studio KEWL in 2017 and has produced notable commission projects for Laneway Festival, Melbourne Music Week, Play On Melbourne, Melbourne Knowledge Week and many more. Through his explorations of the music industry, he has had the chance to work directly with Australian artists including Courtney Barnett, Kirin J Callinan, Sui Zhen, Client Liaison, Jen Choler, KLLO, Totally Mild and Jess Ribeiro and regularly collaborates with fellow film collective Banalarama Studios. Teaming up with Writer, Director, Actor and long-time friend Kathleen Lee, with principal production investment from Screen Australia, Tobias is thrilled to present KEWL studios’ first ever web series, Sex & Death.
“What I think is special about this team is that we have all gone through film school together. Graduates of Film & Television at the Swinburne University of Technology we formed relationships that have carried on for years. I started KEWL studio in 2017 and it has brought us all together again. It’s been wonderful to reconnect and start creating together each as established professionals in our own right. Over the years we have all worked on countless short films, music videos, TV series, features and commercials and Sex & Death is a concentrated effort to establish our own voice as creatives and filmmakers together.” – Tobias Willis
With a knack for intimate character development and sharp dialogue-focused filmmaking, Kathleen Lee’s offbeat romantic comedies present a vital and leading voice in Australian film. Sex & Death accentuates Lee’s instinctive compulsion to depict eccentric but warm characters that celebrate the zeitgeist and landscape of the world around her. Haunted by duplicitous lovers, selfish friends and a tyrannical acting coach, Sex & Death follows Charlie (Lee) on a tumultuous journey to emotional liberation and expressive freedom; drawing directly on Lee’s experience living with undiagnosed Autism Spectrum Disorder. Featuring notable performances from Isabella Giovinazzo (Home and Away) and Raw Comedy winner Jonathan Schuster (Fancy Boy, Fresh Blood), and a few cameos from Tobias himself, Sex & Death is a fresh take on modern day relationships from an essential and underrepresented new viewpoint.
“Since writing Sex & Death I have been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder and am currently writing another show explicitly exploring this. However, Sex & Death is also about my experiences leading up to my diagnoses before I had the language to express it in those terms. Charlie is a person who is innately different trying to navigate how to fit into a world where she doesn’t seem to belong. What’s interesting and different about this story is that it is the main character, the observer, the eyes through which we see the world that is the weird, the different, the neurodiverse character and because of this, it’s the neurotypical people around her: Damian, Tanya and even Greg who become the absurd characters.” – Kathleen Lee
Sex & Death is out now via www.sexanddeath.online/
Sex and Death is a KEWL production. Principal production investment from Screen Australia.
