YOUNG DIRECTOR AWARD 2026
(DREAM PITCH)
FERMENT - Eva Justine Torkkola
Shortlist
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Title:
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FERMENT |
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Director:
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Eva Justine Torkkola |
| Format / Genre: |
Series / Historical Psychological Thriller with a Dark Comedic Bite |
| Director’s Intention: |
I was researching beer when I found the witches. In 2018 I came across an image - Mother Louse, a celebrated English alewife painted around 1650. She is wearing a tall black conical hat. Beside her, a cauldron. At her feet, a cat. In her hand, what looks like a broomstick. She was not a witch. She was one of the most admired brewers of her time. But the image of her has become, without anyone quite noticing, the image we now associate with witchcraft. I couldn't stop pulling on that thread. Alewives brewed in cauldrons over fires. They wore wide black hats to stand out in the marketplace. They kept cats to protect their grain. They carried broomsticks to signal that ale was ready. They were economically powerful, embedded in community life, and largely independent of male authority. Then the Church tightened its grip. Licences were introduced. Brewing was professionalised into male-run guilds. Women were pushed out of the one industry where they held real power. And in that same period - the witch trials began. The overlap is debated by historians. But it is not nothing. And FERMENT is built from that collision. Aggie is not a supernatural figure. She is a pragmatist who gets radicalised by circumstance. That is true to how change has always happened - not through heroes, but through ordinary people pushed past the point of quiet survival. I imagine the series unfolding from the inside of that pressure. Brew rooms and kitchens where resistance accumulates through shared labour, whispered alliances and dark absurdity. The comedy is never separate from the violence - it is how people survive inside systems designed to break them. The laughter and the fury are inseparable. As a queer woman I am drawn to what it meant to love another woman inside this machinery - not as tragedy, but as defiance the institution could never fully name or contain. Aggie's desire is not her downfall. It is the thing that makes her dangerous. |
| Scriptwriter/Director/Creative Nationality: |
Australia |
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