Sustainable Future Award – Amplifying Voices for the Environment

Tom Bannigan ACS (director of photography) and Karl Malakunas (director), Delikado, winner of the 2022 Sustainable Future Award

The Sustainable Future Award was established in 2021 by project sponsor Amanda Maple-Brown. Since its inception in 2021, across five Festivals the award has been presented to five filmmakers out of 46 shortlisted films, representing over 25 countries. These films have reached an audience of over 14,000 attendees at the Sydney Film Festival alone.

Previous winners:

This year marks the 55th edition of Earth Day; it also marked the 5th time we at the Sydney Film Festival distributed the Sustainable Future Award, a one-of-a-kind initiative that works to amplify voices for environmental progress. This $40,000 prize is the largest in the world dedicated to environmentally engaged cinema – be it documentary or fiction, feature-length or short.

In 2024, the Award went to Black Snow, a gripping documentary exposé by Ukrainian-American journalist Alina Simone. The film follows the story of a citizen journalist in Siberia who, at great danger to herself and her children, investigates and calls out the human and environmental costs of wanton coal mining practices. Simone joins esteemed previous recipients Sarvnik Kaur (Against the Tide, 2023), Karl Malakunas (Delikado, 2022), and Eva Orner (Burning, 2021).

And in 2025, it went to Jordan Giusti’s Floodland, a deeply moving story of love and loss set in the northern NSW town of Lismore, Australia’s most flooded postcode and site of the nation’s most costly climate disaster.

On winning the award, Giusti reflected “I think it’s going to mean a lot to a lot of people up there in Lismore, and hopefully winning an award like this, for a film like this can spur some change.”

“Prizes like this can help elevate the project and audience awareness,” affirms Orner, an Academy- and Emmy-Award winning producer and director originally from Melbourne, and the inaugural recipient of the Sustainable Future Award. Her film, Burning, examined how government inaction around climate change and an under-regulated fossil fuel industry contributed to the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-2020.

Extending Orner’s sentiment, Malakunas, a Walkley- and Emmy-nominated journalist and the 2022 recipient for Delikado, highlights the ways in which the Award translated to an increase in the film’s real-world impact. The Sustainable Future Award was “consequential,” he says, “in terms of the force multiplier effect it had on Delikado’s very successful impact campaign to support land defenders in the Philippines.”

The documentary follows the life-endangering efforts of three land defenders fighting to prevent the beautiful Philippine province of Palawan, a burgeoning tourist destination, from being destroyed by corrupt political and business interests.

Malakunas emphasises that receiving the Award was “an extremely important event that gave strength, at a crucial moment, to our efforts to protect and support Delikado’s participants, who were vulnerable to slander or even physical attacks from the powerful politicians whom they exposed in the film.”

The Sustainable Future Award was established by actress, producer, and donor Amanda Maple-Brown. Maple-Brown’s generous financial support is an example of the ways passion and philanthropy come together to shape a better future for all.

If you are interested in learning more about the power of philanthropy at Sydney Film Festival and ways you can join in support, you can do so here.