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February 20, 2026 — 12:43pm
The plot of the short film that will take director Stephen Packer to Tropfest on Sunday night is both clever and topical: when a desperate screenwriter turns to AI for help, he finds it writes a script that has him as the victim.
The founder of what has long been called the world’s biggest short film festival, John Polson, says Packer’s Unprompted is a brilliant take on the threat from AI on the creative industries.
So brilliant that it is among 16 shorts – selected from more than 700 entries – set to screen at the long-awaited return of Tropfest in Sydney’s Centennial Park.
What was once a perennially popular summer event is back for the first time since 2019.
A heavy hitting alliance from business, sport and entertainment is behind the new non-profit Tropfest Foundation, with Sarah Murdoch chairing a board that has Polson, Peter V’landys, Richard Weinberg and Bryan Brown as directors.
Margot Robbie heads a judging panel that includes Sarah Snook, producer Bruna Papandrea and Indigenous filmmaker Dylan River, with George Miller, Miranda Tapsell and Phoebe Tonkin among the invited VIPs.
The festival – livestreamed globally on YouTube – is expected to attract at least 30,000 viewers to the park.
Despite only announcing Tropfest was coming back last September, Polson is surprised by how big it has become and how many sponsors (including Nine Entertainment, publisher of this masthead) have signed up.
“It almost feels bigger than it’s ever been,” Polson says. “When we first started talking about it, we thought ‘it’s been seven years, let’s walk before we run. Let’s find a venue for three or four thousand people – maybe the Entertainment Quarter, maybe Barangaroo.’
“Then we started having meetings and realised ‘wait a minute, people are into this’. The next thing … we’re at Centennial Park for hopefully a very significant number of people.”
While Sunday is the main event, Polson says the new Tropfest has a year-round focus on encouraging emerging talent.
That includes two days of Tropfest Roughcut talks on writing, directing, cinematography and building a career, as well as a scholarship program to give two finalists mentors and meetings with film executives, studios and managers.
Trop Jnr, a competition for budding filmmakers aged 15 and under, will return as a national event lining up with the school year.
“We’re Sydney born and bred but we’re a national event and we’re also a year-round event,” Polson says.
The finalists include two actors who have directed short films, Georgina Haig from Back To The Rafters and Sisi Stringer from Mortal Kombat.
While the rest are pretty much unknown, they are all hoping Tropfest will give the same boost to their careers as it has done for such directors as Justin Kurzel (The Narrow Road to the Deep North), Nash Edgerton (Mr Inbetween) and Emma Freeman (The Newsreader).
Packer, whose day job is directing commercials, shot Unprompted for $3000 in his loungeroom in Melbourne’s Maribyrnong. He used two actors – Will Lonsdale as the screenwriter and Bryan Cooper as the monster that is AI – for two nights.
The idea for the film grew out of his concern about the threat from AI.
“I can definitely relate to the main character,” he says. “In filmmaking, we’ve started to see studios turn to AI as a cheap way to generate content when it comes to the writing process.
“But when we start handing over our creativity to the machine, that’s when we lose the thing that makes us unique.”
Having been an assistant to director Jennifer Kent on The Babadook and The Nightingale, Packer hopes Tropfest will help him shoot his own feature film.
It would expand a short film he shot last year, Alpha Test, about a young detective trying to solve a murder helped by a hologram of the victim.
While his films focus on emerging technology, the spark for Packer’s filmmaking ambition goes back to the DVD.
“The thing that most inspired me to become a filmmaker was the extra features on the special edition of The Lord of the Rings DVDs,” he says. “I loved those movies so much that I watched everything, and they really made me understand the process and fall in love with it.”
Polson says that Packer was far from alone in making AI the subject of his Tropfest film.
Some that drew on AI made the finals – the filmmakers had to declare it – but others created entirely with it missed out.
“AI is a beautiful tool but it doesn’t replace artists,” Polson says. “When you really rely on it that much, in the case of Tropfest, you’re probably not going to get in.”
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