Jacob Hickey on making factual TV with purpose

Blackfella's head of factual talks about keeping a format fresh and avoiding tackiness in the third season of SBS's 'Filthy Rich & Homeless'.

Jacob Hickey’s name has been popping up on prestigious Australian documentaries since 2010 when he won the AFI Award for best documentary direction for Inside the Firestorm, a searing ABC feature-length doc about Black Saturday’s bushfires.

Since then, Hickey has written and produced many award-winning series, including Once Upon a Time in Cabramatta (2012) which attracted one of the biggest audiences ever for an SBS documentary and won Gold and Silver Medals at the New York Film Festival’s International Film and TV Awards; and First Contact which won the TV Week Logie for Most Outstanding Factual Program in 2015. 

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Rochelle Siemienowicz is the ArtsHub Group's Education and Career Editor. She was previously a journalist for Screenhub and is a writer, film critic and cultural commentator with a PhD in Australian cinema. She was the co-host of Australia's longest-running film podcast 'Hell is for Hyphenates' and has written a memoir, Fallen, published by Affirm Press. Her second book, Double Happiness, a novel, will be published by Midnight Sun in 2024. Instagram: @Rochelle_Rochelle Twitter: @Milan2Pinsk