Lucy Knox’s teenage dreams

Filmed over the Australian summer break, Lucy Knox’s languid dreamy film Eighteen documents the thoughts, hopes, and fears of a group of eighteen-year-olds making their uncertain steps into adulthood.

Commissioned by Trust, it is set against the backdrop of an increasingly complex world – where the pressures of social media, climate change, and an uncertain future loom large. 

The director commented: "I’d been shooting some commercials with a lot of exacting pre-production, storyboards, pre-visualisation etc. So I was hungry for the challenge of a project that was more reactionary and documentary. I wanted a project that forced me to be finding and creating the story, in the moment, on my feet.

"Around the same time I went to my cousin's eighteenth birthday. Talking to his friends made me see that this generation faces such a different world than I did at eighteen. It feels like the world has accelerated so rapidly in their lifetime, it’s hard to deny how the escalating omnipresence of social media and technology has impacted them."