Lismore

A new feature film from acclaimed Australian Filmmaker Benjamin Gilmour
Format: Feature Film (90–100 mins)
Genre: Coming-of-Age / Arts Drama / Regional Story
Setting: Lismore, Northern NSW – present day
Tone: Gentle, heartfelt, uplifting, melancholic
Logline: A teenage pizza delivery boy with untapped musical talent falls in with a colony of elderly bohemian artists in Lismore, who open his eyes to a world of creative possibility, mentorship, and self-expression.

Synopsis

Seventeen-year-old Mikey Santos is a pizza delivery kid in flood-battered Lismore, just trying to keep his head down — at school, at home, and in a town where the future feels washed out. His mother works double shifts at the local aged care home. His father’s long gone. His days blur into scooters, snacks, and beats he’s too shy to share with anyone.

That changes when a delivery lands him at the crumbling front door of an eccentric old house on the hill — a kind of commune for retired bohemian artists, ex-activists, and free-thinking outsiders. They’re loud, chaotic, and endlessly curious. They also hear something in Mikey’s quiet music that no one else has bothered to notice.

Drawn into their world of second-hand instruments, op shop costumes, and deep conversations by candlelight, Mikey begins to see himself — and his town — through new eyes. But as floodwaters rise again and the precarious living situations of everyone he’s come to love are threatened, Mikey must decide what kind of future he wants to build. Not just for himself, but for the community that saved him.

Lismore is a tender coming-of-age story about finding voice, chosen family, and art in the ruins. A love letter to the Northern Rivers, and to all the strange, magical people who survive in the margins.

Concept

Lismore is a 90-minute feature film blending coming-of-age drama, regional Australian realism, and whimsical melancholia. It evokes the lyrical tone of The Rider, Billy Elliot, or The Florida Project — films that centre on unlikely bonds and internal awakenings in forgotten places.

The film’s aesthetic is raw yet dreamlike: flooded streets shimmer under streetlights, abandoned music rooms echo with broken chords, and op-shop kitsch meets genuine human warmth. Lismore is rendered not as a disaster zone, but as a complex, creative, damaged place teetering between rebirth and erasure.

Mikey is a quietly magnetic protagonist — culturally displaced, emotionally repressed, and artistically alive. His journey mirrors that of the town itself: fractured by loss, but capable of transformation. The artists — queer, mad, elderly, brilliant — offer mentorship, mischief, and a glimpse of a different life, one where failure isn’t feared, and beauty is a form of protest.

Lismore is ultimately a story of survival — not in the sensationalised sense, but in the real, small, deeply human ways that matter: connection, courage, and creation.

Development Stage

Multiple drafts completed and looking for low-budget financing