The theme of this year’s festival was ‘Water is Life’. 

Keely said her teacher Mr O’Keefe advised her to enter the competition because he knew of her film-making talents. 

Keely decided she would put her film-making skills to use and created a short three-minute video on how wasteful people were with water. 

Have a look at Keely’s winning entry in the video below.

Throughout Keely’s short film she used a reoccurring motif of dead plants. She said if we continued to waste water then we wouldn’t have anything left, everything would die.

“I portrayed my message of not wasting water through the action of wasting water,” she said.  

“We are so lucky to have clean water compared to those living in developing countries, but the problem is we take it for granted.”

To Keely’s surprise her video went extremely well and she won.

“I never expected it to go this far, it was just a spare of the moment kind of thing,” she said.

The year 11 student encouraged people to save water through simple actions such as turning the tap off when brushing teeth, having shorter showers and stand by taps when filling up buckets to prevent overflowing. 

Next year’s Rahamim Ecology Centre short film competition will have the theme ‘Soil is Life’. 

The Rahamim Ecology Centre is the environmental arm of the Institute of the Sisters of Mercy of Australia and Papua New Guinea,