Podcast – Anna Barnes on creating Safe Home for SBS
Screenwriter Anna Barnes on the creation of Safe Home – from pitching to SBS, developing the story, and to seeing it brought to life by the cast and crew.
Anna Barnes
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After years working in theatre, writing plays such as the acclaimed 2018 one woman show Lethal Indifference for Sydney Theatre Company, screenwriter Anna Barnes feels like she’s found her home in television.
“I think I'll always write theatre and probably always write non-fiction, but TV has just been such a natural fit,” Barnes says. “I came to it later in my career and as soon as I started, I was like, ‘I wish I found out about this earlier.’”
Throughout the podcast, Barnes talks about getting her start in television with the short-form series Content, before writing on ABC’s Retrograde and now Safe Home for SBS. She talks to how the idea of Safe Home was sparked from her personal experiences working at community legal centres that represented victim survivors of family violence; creating a pitch deck and pilot script to show to SBS; collaborating with writers Jean Tong and Michelle Law; and seeing the series be brought to life by the cast and crew including director Stevie Cruz-Martin.
“What I really loved is this was Stevie's first long TV [project] and it was my first hour-long TV thing as well,” Barnes says. “She really just dedicated so much of herself to the work and that was such a privilege as a creator to be working with a director who is that committed to the work.”
Cruz-Martin directs all four episodes of Safe Home, which is the first project to be produced under Imogen Banks’ Kindling Pictures, with Emelyne Palmer co-producing. A gripping drama, it stars Aisha Dee as a twenty-something who begins working at a struggling family violence legal centre. Also starring Virginia Gay and Mabel Li, Safe Home premieres on SBS and SBS On Demand from 11 May.
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