Ana Kokkinos

Ana Kokkinos is a screenwriter, director and producer whose extensive career spans film and television. Her groundbreaking films have won over 30 international and national awards and have been officially selected for numerous festivals around the world.

Her short feature ONLY THE BRAVE (1994) was selected for Venice, Toronto and the San Francisco International Gay and Lesbian Festival where the film won an audience award for Best Feature.

She followed that up with her first full length feature, HEAD ON (1998), selected for Director’s Fortnight at Cannes. It caused a riot on the Croisette – young audiences loved the film, old audiences hated it. Despite the controversy, or perhaps because of it, Head On was an unexpected box office hit and has gone on to enter the canon of queer films globally.

THE BOOK OF REVELATION (2006) sold to 30 territories and had its premiere at the Visions Section at Toronto. It’s a film that divided audiences even more than her previous films because of the reversal at the heart of it – man as victim, women as perpetrators.

Ana’s next feature film, BLESSED (2009) won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Screenplay at San Sebastian and won Best Film as voted by an international jury of 700 teenagers at the Giffoni Children’s Film Festival in Italy. Critic David Stratton recently nominated Blessed as one of his top movies, praising its portrayal of mothers and children and the strong performances, especially from Frances O’Connor.

Kokkinos also collaborated with four directors in the chapter film HERE OUT WEST (2021), a multi-cultural mosaic of connected stories set in Western Sydney, which opened the Sydney Film Festival in 2021.

In TV, Ana has directed episodes of THE SECRET LIFE OF US (2003-2004), the award winning SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY (2017) and FIRES (2021) which screened at the BFI London Film Festival in 2022. In 2019, she directed the first three episodes of THE HUNTING, one of the highest rating drama series ever commissioned by SBS.

More recently, she directed episodes of Series 1 and 2 of TEN POUND POMS (2023-2025) for the BBC and STAN. Ten Pound Poms was the highest rating new drama for the BBC in 2023. Ana was set-up director and co-executive producer on Series 2.

Ana is an actor’s director. She’s worked with some of our most distinguished thespians including Hugo Weaving, Frances O’Connor, Miranda Otto, Richard Roxburgh and Anna Torv.

In 2010, Kokkinos was honoured at the Seattle International Film Festival as an Emerging Master Filmmaker.

ANA KOKKINOS – AN OEUVRE OF OUTSIDERS, written by Kelly McWilliam was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2019. It contains critical readings of all her films, particularly in relation to ethnicity, sex and sexuality.