TONY SARRE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Tony is a Blind, Australian scriptwriter, director, and filmmaker whose current body of work centralises accessibility in and within the arts. Born with an eye disease named Retinitis Pigmentosa, Tony has known since his teenage years that he would eventually go blind – which activated for Tony the cultural myth that his blindness should limit his ability to participate in the world. During his years backpacking around Australia, Tony still recalls a fellow tourist expressing that, “the first light of dawn seems to have ignited the surface of Uluru into a living wall of fire. But then there are the straight rivers of shifting colours as rain water cascades down, following a thousand feet of human footsteps.” For Tony this was a pivotal moment which shaped his ability to realise the evocative potential for audio description. 

With collaboration at the heart of his practice, Tony’s work interrogates how to treat audio description as a complex and evolving language, imbued with narrative flair. In the last year, Tony along with his co-director has completed his Screenwest funded short film, ‘Turning to White’, for later development into a feature, The Roadhouse Blues, alongside his concurrent behind the scenes documentary, Beyond the Blues. He is now driving a disability-led podcast initiative which seeks to position individuals with disability as creative agents of their own content. In partnership with Arts Access Victoria and DADAA, Tony is currently employed as the artistic director for Perth’s second biennial The Other Film Festival, as well as an active member on the Diversity Committee at Screenwest.