Director's Works
A Thousand Odd Days Riley Blakeway
Riley Blakeway is an Australian born award winning filmmaker with a self taught career that’s spanned for more than 15 years. His dedication to authenticity, performance and emotional storytelling has garnered success across music videos, commercials and narrative shorts. His films have screened at festivals around the world, including SXSW, the UKMVA’s, the Vimeo Awards, Raindance, Ciclope and The New Orleans Film Festival. His work has been shared by The New York Times, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, Pitchfork, Clash, ID, NPR, Rolling Stone and The Los Angeles Times. Riley’s collaborations with Ghanaian-Australian performing artist Genesis Owusu landed him his 9th vimeo staff pick and a J-Award for ABC/Triple J’s ‘Australian Music Video of the year. His experimental Australian short ‘INVINCIBL3’ (2021) premiered on Nowness and has since been featured by Director’s Library, the One Point Four Awards, the Webby Awards and took home ‘Best Direction in a Music Video’ at the 2022 Australian Directors Guild Awards. Riley’s Narrative short ‘A Thousand Odd Days’ starring Tom Wilson and Angie Milliken is out for competition in 2024, premiered at the 72nd Melbourne International Film Festival and won 'Best Direction' at Flickerfest 2025.
"The strangest feedback from this film is showing my close friends and most of them realising they don’t really know my story. I don’t often talk about my childhood with domestic violence with them or anyone, nor do I find much comfort posting publicly about it. At times, I still feel silenced. But for that reason, this film is one I had to make and hopefully captures most of everything I have to say about the lasting impact of DV and subsequent mental health issues that often follow. I gave my entire heart to it and I found my limit of writing from introspection while making this film, but I couldn’t seem to look away. My hope now is that it reaches the people that need it with love and in some small way, helps further the dialogue around DV that we all need to be having"