Maras and team, won two awards on the night for Best Screenplay in a Short Film and Best Short Fiction Film. “I’m pretty amazed actually,” Maras told Neos Kosmos.

“We’re very fortunate as a production to have won [the awards]. “The AACTA awards really are Australia’s main film awards and to be recognised by your industry peers on that level opens doors to work with quality people in the future and hopefully for some funding as well.” Not one to slow down, Maras is keeping busy with more projects up his sleeve.

“I am working on an international crime story and a thriller piece. And I am also looking at a war film together with another Australia company so I have a few things on the boil at the moment.” The Palace also picked up the Movie Network Channels Award for Best Australian Short Film at the 21st Annual Flickerfest Awards.

The Palace is a 2011 Cypriot-Australian short film co-production, written and directed by Anthony Maras, and shot along the United Nations Buffer Zone in Cyprus.

The film was inspired by true events that took place during the 1974 Turkish Invasion of Cyprus, including the confession (later retracted) of a now prominent actor, who detailed on live television how as a 19 year old conscript, he had killed 10 unarmed people on the orders of his superiors.

The Palace was produced by AntHouse Films, Cyan Films and SeaHorse Films, as an Australia-Cyprus co-production.

Synopsis

Cyprus 1974. A Greek Cypriot family flees advancing Turkish forces and takes refuge in an abandoned Ottoman-era palace in the Cypriot capital Nicosia. When a young Turkish Cypriot conscript comes face to face with the family in hiding, he is forced to confront the brutal reality of war and his role in it.

Production

• Shot in October 2010, entirely on location in Cyprus, along the United Nations Green Line in Nicosia, in buildings and streets still ravaged by the 1974 Cyprus conflict.

• The “Palace” scenes were filmed at the House of Hadjigeorkakis Kornessios (1779), a landmark Ottoman Era residence which was home to the “Dragoman of Cyprus” – the chief tax collector in Cyprus during Ottoman rule – who was later hung in the town square during a revolt. The House has been restored to its former glory and now serves as a museum administered by the Department of Antiquities in the southern Greek part of Nicosia.

• The opening scene of The Palace was filmed in a real life bunker in the corner room of the “Ypnos Hotel” that borders the United Nations buffer zone near the Ledra Street Checkpoint in Nicosia. The bunker’s original sandbags and machine gun turrets had not moved an inch since the 1974 hostilities. Many of the bullet holes and bomb-blasted walls, props and costumes used throughout the film are the real thing – relics of the 1974 war.
• Neos Kosmos