Matthew Walker
Editing
Biography
Matthew Walker is an Australian director and long time editor with more than 20 years’ experience in documentary storytelling. His debut feature, I’m Wanita, premiered at Hot Docs 2021 and went on to win the Sydney Film Fes:val Award for Best Australian Documentary, the Raindance Award for Best Music Documentary, and the AIDC Award for Best Feature Documentary. He recently directed the YouTube documentary series Cooking for Seamus, a character-driven portrait of a disabled bull with a devoted online following. Live It Up: The Mental As Anything Story marks his second music-driven feature documentary.
Known For

A young playboy who learns he has one month until he becomes infertile sets out to procreate as much as possible.
Not Suitable For Children

Live It Up is a feature documentary celebrating Mental as Anything, the art-school band whose irreverent humour, visual art and clever pop songs made them one of Australia's most distinctive cultural forces. Following the release of Nips Are Getting Bigger in 1979, the Mentals rose quickly from inner-city Sydney pubs to national fame, becoming masters at capturing Australian suburban life with warmth, wit and playfulness. While success came fast, they never treated it with reverence. Funny, warm and unexpectedly moving, Live It Up explores how Mental as Anything navigated fame, longevity and the pressures of the music industry while holding fast to their humour and creative spirit - revealing why their music continues to resonate today.
Live It Up: The Mental As Anything Story

A big cat conservationist and his filmmaker brother travel into the Indonesian jungle to find and document the rare and endangered Javan leopard. As they travel deeper and deeper into the jungle they come to the realisation that they are being stalked by a deadly predator.
The Jungle

I'm Wanita is the story of a renegade country music singer from Tamworth, Australia, hell-bent on realizing her childhood dreams of stardom.
I'm Wanita

In 2008, feature documentary, The Oasis, shocked Australia with its gritty insight into the lives of homeless teens at a notorious youth refuge in inner city Sydney. An outpouring of social and political goodwill followed, with the then Prime Minister pledging to halve homelessness by 2020. A decade later, with social inequality and homelessness worse than ever, the original participants reflect on where their lives have taken them.
Life After the Oasis

Suellyn thought the Department of Community Services (DOCS) would only remove children in extreme cases, until her own grandchildren were taken in the middle of the night. Hazel decided to take on the DOCS system after her fourth grandchild was taken into state care. Jen Swan expected to continue to care for her grandchildren but DOCS deemed her unsuitable, a shock not just to her but to her sister, Deb, who was, at the time, a DOCS worker. The rate of Indigenous child removal has actually increased since Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered the apology to the ‘stolen generations’ in 2008. These four grandmothers find each other and start a national movement to place extended families as a key solution to the rising number of Aboriginal children in out-of-home care. They are not only taking on the system; they are changing it…
After the Apology

Milly's world revolves around her pet guinea pig. When her mother attempts to engineer for her a 'real' friend, it results in ridicule and forces Milly to question her sense of self.
Sherbert Rozencrantz, You're Beautiful

The locals of Waterloo, Sydney, stand their ground and fight back as property developers and politicians try to take over the suburb.