Graduate Diploma: Editing, 2011; Master of Arts: Editing, 2018
Jessie Hildebrand is a screen editor with experience across drama, documentary and music videos. As an assistant editor, she also has over 30 credits working alongside some of Australia’s best cutters.
Jessie’s short films have won prizes at Flickerfest and premiered at the Melbourne International Film Festival, the Sydney Film Festival and St Kilda.
Her short film Yulubidyi: Until the End was nominated at the 2019 AACTA awards. That film and another short, My First Panic, scored Jessie an Australian Screen Editors (ASE) Guild nomination.
Jessie was an assembly editor on The Letdown’s second season as well as on ABC’s Cleverman series, and fellow alum Madeleine Hetherton-Miau’s The Surgery Ship docu-series.
Jessie has also served as assistant editor on feature films such as Jirga, UnIndian and Cook Nga Pouwhenua. She also served as associate editor on the feature film Here Out West, directed by fellow alumni Lucy Gaffy and Julie Kalceff among others, which opened the 2021 Sydney Film Festival.
Jessie was assembly editor on 2022 feature We Are Still Here, an anthology from First Nations writers and directors, overseen by alum Beck Cole as a follow up to her 2011 feature Here I Am.
AFTRS HIGHLIGHT
It’s easily the people I met at AFTRS. When studying at AFTRS you get thrown into this intense environment where you’re spending 24/7 with the people in your cohort and you form these deep friendships pretty quickly. Some of the people I met at AFTRS are some of my closest friends, and a bunch are still collaborators I’m working with today. I also developed strong friendships with a couple of the teachers. One teacher in particular became a mentor. And his mentorship has continued to be incredibly important to me since leaving AFTRS.
CAREER HIGHLIGHT
After I finished at AFTRS in 2011, I got the chance to be an assistant editor for some of my favourite Australia editors (Marcus D’Arcy, Mark Perry and Roland Gallois) on some projects I’m really proud to have worked on such as Last Cab to Darwin, Cleverman and Deep Water. I then moved on to working as an assembly editor and have felt nothing but support within the editing community to make the jump from assistant editor to editor. Most recently I was an associate editor on the feature film Here Out West. The editor, Martin Connor, was really generous in showing me his process.