Mel Gibson's war drama Hacksaw Ridge will join another film shot in Australia, Garth Davis' Lion, for a run at the Oscars later this year.

The Mad Max and Braveheart star told the audience at Sydney Film Festival, introducing the Australian premiere of Jean Francois' Richet's livewire thriller Blood Father, that his latest movie as director has tested strongly in the US.

"It's a 100 per cent Aussie film," he said. "An independent film. We screened it in the States and it went through the roof."

Short Cuts hears the movie, which has Andrew Garfield as a conscientious objector who becomes a war hero after saving more than 75 of his comrades' lives during the Battle of Okinawa, is headed for a November release in the US and Australia to position it for the Hollywood awards season.

Gibson, who plays a grizzled ex-con who has to protect his daughter from drug dealers in Blood Father, is back in Australia to finish post-production.

Garfield plays real-life war hero Desmond Doss in Hacksaw Ridge alongside an impressive cast that includes Sam Worthington, Vince Vaughn, Hugo Weaving, Teresa Palmer, Richard Roxburgh, Rachel Griffiths and Ryan Corr.

With producer Emile Sherman teaming up with Harvey Weinstein again after their Oscars success on The King's Speech, Lion will also open in the US in November for an awards season run.

Adapted from Saroo Brierley's memoir A Long Way Home, the drama tells the story of an Indian-Australian man who sets out, using Google Earth and a few scraps of information, to find the family he lost contact with as a five-year-old in India when he caught the wrong train.

It stars Dev Patel, Rooney Mara and Nicole Kidman, who is now shooting the TV series Top of the Lake 2 in Sydney.

Festival competition heats up

Tense drama that has become a competition front runner ... Land of Mine.

At the halfway mark of Sydney Film Festival's $60,000 competition for "courageous, audacious and cutting-edge" cinema, there were two standout films.

Ivan Sen's Goldstone, which takes Indigenous detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen) into the outback on a missing persons case, was a deeply felt four-star drama, though maybe too conventionally told to fit the competition's criteria.

The front runner has to be Martin Zandvliet's Land of Mine, a wonderfully tense and compassionate four-and-a-half-star drama about German prisoners of war being forced to clear land mines from a Danish beach after five years of Nazi occupation at the end of World War II.

It turns on an impressive performance by Roland Moller as a harsh Danish sergeant who is assigned a team of mostly German teenagers for a supremely dangerous job. Captors feeling compassion for their wartime prisoners is a theme that goes at least as far back as the classic The Grand Illusion in the 1930s but Land of Mine feels like a fresh WWII story.

While it divided viewers - frequently along gender lines - Kleber Mendonca Filho's Brazilian drama Aquarius, about a retired music critic who is battling to keep her beloved apartment from a property developer, had many passionate fans. And with an audacious approach to its theme - the struggle against the indignities of ageing - it could come into calculations as well.

With one of three interconnected stories in Kelly Reichardt's quietly moving drama Uncertain Women much stronger than the other two, it was still a more effective film than Xavier Dolan's intense drama It's Only the End of the World, about a playwright returning home to tell his family he is dying, and Ivo M. Ferreira's Letters from War, an evocative but meandering drama about acclaimed author Antonio Lobo Antunes' missives to his beloved from the Angolan frontlines in the 1970s.

Fellowship winners named

Damian Walshe-Howling at the Sydney Film Festival premiere of his short film MESSiAH. Photo: Christopher Pearce

Once Damian Walshe-Howling was best-known for playing tattooed killer Benji Veniamin in the first season of Underbelly.

But he is fast becoming known as a filmmaker after a warm response at the world premiere of his short film, MESSiAH, at Sydney Film Festival.

It was made with the backing of the Weinstein Company after Walshe-Howling was one of four winners of the global Lexus Short Film series that attracted more than 4000 entries from more than 100 countries.

His film, a comedy about an Irish tourist who comes across a mysterious stranger played by David Gulpilil on an outback road, debuted as the festival announced the winners of the first four $50,000 Lexus Australia Short Film Fellowships.

A jury chaired by Judy Davis awarded Anya Beyersdorf, Brooke Goldfinch, Alex Murawski and Alex Ryan a $50,000 grant each to make a short film, which will premiere at the festival next year.

Australians team up for movie about ice-skating drama

Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn in the forthcoming film adaptation of Suicide Squad. 

Director Craig Gillespie has teamed up with fellow Australian Margot Robbie for her planned movie about disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding.

Having made his name with Lars and the Real Girl after moving to New York at 19, Gillespie joins the project after Fright Night, Million Dollar Arm and The Finest Hours.

Robbie, who follows up Whisky Tango Foxtrot with The Legend of Tarzan and Suicide Squad in cinemas soon, will star and produce I, Tonya.

A champion American skater, Harding was behind a plan to have rival Nancy Kerrigan's leg broken before the 1994 Winter Olympics.

Variety reports that with a director attached and a script written on spec by Steven Rogers, "plenty of suitors are sure to head for the project in the coming weeks".

Robbie is also down to play opposite Domhnall Gleeson as the wife of Winnie The Pooh author A. A. Milne in Goodbye Christopher Robin.

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