South coast film winning international accolades

It was "love at first site" when she first bought on the south coast - "this beautiful coastline I did not even know existed," Ms Stang said.

In 2019, she began writing a movie script interweaving her experiences with these imagined scenarios, creating a fictional character, based heavily on herself, moving to the south coast to establish a new life.

Now the beautiful landscape she found is the setting for her new film 'Mother Mountain'.

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Mother Mountain traces the story of a young Jewish mother moving to the base of Gulaga in search of a fresh start only to be forced to face her past trauma. She meets an indigenous family, who show her the beautiful spirituality of the land, and Mother Mountain.

It was a case of "art imitating life," Ms Stang said, when she moved her family from Sydney to her acreage in 2019, a few months into the writing process.

The story is allegorical; imagination is interwoven with Ms Stang's own personal experiences and reflections to create a storyline exploring themes of inherited family trauma, motherhood, connection to country and healing.

"Intergenerational trauma is definitely a personal journey for me," Ms Stang - the grandchild of four Holocaust survivors - said.

She said the process of writing oneself into a film was "exposing and vulnerable". Her family had to move out of their home in November 2020 while it was transformed into a movie set. The lead actress Emilie Cocquerel wore Ms Stang's clothes, while her onscreen child was played by Ms Stang's son. The movie was filmed at locations around Narooma, Tilba and Bermagui, including Narooma Public School.

Ms Stang said Mother Mountain featured strongly in the film.

"She's a character in the film," she said. "We felt her presence really strongly in the filming process.

"As a dormant volcano, that allegories that the protagonist is bringing up all this repressed emotion and the mountain is watching as it all blows up."

Mother Mountain won the Best Narrative Feature Film category at the Cannes World Film Festival for the month of October 2021 and is a shortlisted finalist in the annual awards - announced in May. Mother Mountain premiered at the Jewish International Film Festival in Melbourne on March 6.

Mother Mountain is released in cinemas, including Narooma Kinema, on April 28.