Bill Bennett's remarkable career in film has spanned four decades, with a body of work that includes seventeen feature films and numerous documentaries. As a producer, director, and writer, he has been recognized with numerous awards and nominations, including two Australian Film Institute Awards for Best Film and Best Director, as well as two Logies for his earlier journalistic and documentary work.
Bill's film career began in 1972 when he left medical school at Queensland University to pursue a career at the Australian Broadcasting Commission. He spent ten years working as a journalist, and then as a producer/director on various programs, including Four Corners, This Day Tonight, and the acclaimed documentary series A Big Country.
In 1982, he made his first independent dramatized documentary, which won the Sydney Film Festival Award for Best Documentary. A few years later, he made his first feature-length film, A Street To Die, which received AFI nominations for Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. The film won Best Picture at the prestigious Karlovy Vary Film Festival.
Bill has had two films selected for the Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival, four films at the Toronto International Film Festival, and numerous other films have been selected for other major festivals. His films have been distributed by most Hollywood studios, and he has had three major international retrospectives of his work, including ones in the US, Germany, and India. The New York Museum of Modern Art has also screened his movies.
In 2017, Bill wrote, directed, and produced a feature-length theatrical documentary on intuition, called PGS - Intuition is your Personal Guidance System, which screened to acclaim in cinemas across Australia and the US. Two years later, he followed up with another feature-length theatrical documentary, this one on fear, called Facing Fear, which also screened to much acclaim in cinemas in Australia and the US.
In 2024, Australian distributor Maslow Entertainment released Bill's seventeenth feature film, The Way, My Way, which became the second highest-grossing Australian independent film of the year within six weeks of its release. Based on his best-selling memoir of the same title, the film tells the story of his walking the famed pilgrimage route the Camino de Santiago some ten years earlier.
