Filming in Whitsunday Islands

Announcing SAVAGE SANDS: A Sun-Drenched Descent into Survival

Australia's remote Whitsunday Islands and Great Barrier Reef will serve as stunning location for ambitious short film production Savage Sands for Presidential Productions © James Cunningham

Independent Australian filmmaker James Cunningham has announced his latest short film project, Savage Sands, a visceral and uncompromising survival thriller set against the striking natural beauty of Australia's stunning Whitsunday Islands.

A slow-burn psychological descent cloaked in sun-bleached beaches and tropical isolation, Savage Sands follows Castaway Jack, a lone man stranded on a remote island after a violent storm. As he battles hunger, exposure, and the merciless elements, Jack is also forced to confront something far more confronting: the emergence of his own primal instincts. What begins as a fight for survival gradually transforms into a meditation on ownership, control, and the thin line separating civilisation from savagery.

Described by Cunningham as a “deliberately bold and unapologetic” work, Savage Sands continues the filmmaker’s ongoing exploration of moral ambiguity. Rather than offering comfort or clear ethical signposts, the short screenplay poses a single unsettling question to its audience: What would I do if I was trapped on a deserted island?

To be filmed entirely on location across multiple islands in Australia’s stunning Whitsundays and Great Barrier Reef, the ambitious project will use its idyllic setting as both seduction and threat. Where lush paradise becomes a psychological pressure cooker; a place where beauty and brutality coexist, and where survival begins to justify increasingly extreme behaviour. Local actor Mathis Conjat joined Cunningham during pre-production assisting with location and camera tests.

Produced as a not-for-profit independent film under the Presidential Productions banner, Savage Sands marks Cunningham’s most physically demanding and visually raw work to date. With its emphasis on elemental storytelling, minimal dialogue, and immersive atmosphere, the film will position itself within a lineage of iconic survival cinema while remaining unmistakably contemporary in its thematic concerns.

As Savage Sands moves through early pre-production toward a festival debut, Cunningham promises a work that resists easy categorisation — a film that is as confronting as it is visually hypnotic, and one that invites audiences to examine the darker corners of their own humanity.

For more information visit presproductionsco.com/savage-sands

---