Entertainment
15 August, 2025
Local company with Heart
ATHERTON company Millstream Productions has been thrown into a spectacular spotlight ever since it won an international award for a documentary trailer in France.
The win has opened new doors with directors Matthew Blyth and Alaneo Gloor in negotiations with the big boys around the world for a contract to take Heart, to a fully-blown documentary.
Last Thursday, those negotiations went up a notch with the Canadian Broadcasting Commission sending a letter of intent stating it wanted to fund the project for inclusion in its longest-running science and nature series, The Nature of Things.
“We are pretty excited, but there is a way to go yet,” Matthew said last week.
Heart is a short trailer, or “teaser” as Matthew prefers, about an extraordinary innovation, the personal story behind it, and the promise of a life-altering medical breakthrough. It also creates an overwhelming sense of urgency for anyone who watches it.
It won Best Science Pitch at the prestigious Sunny Side of the Doc International Marketplace forum, standing out from an impressive 100 submissions from 61 countries.
About 2,000 participants, including producers, directors, broadcasters, and industry professionals attended the event, which is designed to explore and promote documentary creation, production and innovation and provide a global networking platform.
“It just blows my mind that a small production company from Far North Queensland can beat the best of the best of the best science production companies in the world,” Matthew said.
“That’s due to the amazing story that we have the exclusive rights to, but it doesn’t take anything away from our own filmmaking ability. You can have a great story, but unless you can execute it, you’ve got nothing.”
Millstream Productions has been in operation for 12 years, with Matthew the “blow-in” (who moved to the Tablelands when he met his wife –whose family has been in the region for 110 years) and co-director Alaneo, a “long-term local”.
Both men have years of experience in production and film, but after collaborating on one documentary project, and then a second a few years later, they recognised a synergy and decided to join forces.
“We’ve done explainers, the landing page CSIRO clip, worked on all sorts of R&D developments around the country,” Matthew said.
“I’m really proud of the ethnographic documentary work we’ve done in terms of recording languages and stories the length and breadth of different communities from right around Australia. That’s something I really love.”
The team is also proud of its work with Parks Australia, and the recent filming of an Australian marine park documentary which examines the Coral Sea and the marine park in south-west Western Australia.
“That has some awesome First Nation characters and really awesome science as well. That’s a massive passion project. It’s a magnificent project,” Matthew said.
“We still need to get it over the line post-production, but we want to clear the decks and hit the ground running for Heart.
“That’s not to say we don’t welcome any local projects - at any time. Anything that comes our way, we’ll consider if it’s good, honest work.
“You never know where a project will take you.”
And so it was in the case of Heart.
The story is about Dr Daniel Timms, and begins with a father-son workshop in Brisbane to cutting-edge medical laboratories in Texas and the creation of a revolutionary artificial heart pump, the Bivacor.
It introduces characters who desperately need the device, and introduces world-renowned heart specialists fighting for its introduction.
“Sadly, Daniel’s father passed in 2005, but he was instrumental in Daniel’s thinking to develop this incredible pump, with this one moving part,” Mathew said.
“His dad was a plumber, so there’s good, commonsense Australian know-how.”
Daniel’s father lived long enough to witness a trial implant of the Bivacor heart into a sheep.
“His passing was devastating, but I think it literally lit a fire under Daniel and enabled him to push his work, but also to have great empathy, after this disease affected his family.”
All of the characters, here and in the US, as well as footage of an actual transplant, combine to capture the incredible story of an Australian- made, Australian-owned mechanical heart and the race to bring it to fruition.
“There are an incredible number of international collaborators and without them it would not be where it is,” Matthew said.
“Daniel’s quite amazing in the way he has pulled this team together, given people autonomy, but also gotten the best out of different people.”
Matthew said the trailer also brought home the numbers – 8.6 million people a year will die from heart failure.
“That’s an awful lot of people, and only 5000 to 6000 of those individuals will actually end up getting a heart transplant,” he said.
“Bud Frasier ... said in an interview that that’s a paltry number.
“This device, just like an artificial hip or an artificial knee, you can take it off the shelf, implant it in someone, and in a few hours their life is extended exponentially.”
The Bivacor device was still in trial while ethical, medical and international codes and guides were assessed. But the story needed to be out.
Matthew said the documentary would likely be finished by 2027, if not earlier, once it gets a green light.
Like Millstream’s own story, the documentary is “about never giving up.”
“And it’s not just people with heart disease, or inventors or engineers, it’s something that speaks to every person on the planet,” Matthew said.
“No matter what the obstacles are, no matter how tough it gets, if you continue to believe and push forward, you can do incredible things. And that’s been the case with all the characters in the project and the documentary itself, just to get to this point.
“Everyone loves a good hero story and that is what this story has in spades.”
