CANBERRA filmmaker Linda Chen is one of five Australian artists selected to participate in the program “Untapped”.

A talent development program for the next generation of undiscovered and underrepresented Australian screen voices, “Untapped” will help launch the international careers of Chen, along with Kylie Aoibheann McDonnell, Shannan Tamby Lim, Kalu Oji and Sophie Smyth.

Administered by Australians in Film and Screen Australia and funded through the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the five filmmakers will be connected with Oscar and Emmy award-winning production companies, including See-Saw Films, Made Up Stories, Lucky Chap Entertainment, and Truant Pictures to develop their early or debut work for the global market.

Chen’s selected work is a half-hour dramedy series, “How Did We F*ck This Up?”, in which a suffragette is miraculously reincarnated into the body of a modern day, pansexual Asian woman as she runs into many of the same frustrations, she did a century earlier.

The series was developed through Screen Canberra’s “AcceleratorPOD” and was a finalist in Screenmakers’ Conference’s Pitch-O-Rama and Melbourne Webfest’s Pitch iView. In 2020, Chen was an “Early Phase” grant recipient at The Street Theatre, completing a full concept treatment for her play, “Linger”.

“It’s incredibly exciting and a bit of an honour, of course,” says Chen, who has worked in the Canberra arts scene since her teens and credits the local community for providing a supportive, informal training ground in her practice.

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