How the actor-turned-director tackled dual roles and personal themes in his new film Sweet Milk Lake
Harvey Zielinski’s first journey as a director got off to a flying start with his film Sweet Milk Lake It makes its debut at the Melbourne International Film Festival, which announced its 2026 program on Thursday night.
The film is already competing for two of the richest awards in the industry: MIFF’s $140,000 Bright Horizons prize next month and the $100,000 Cinefest Oz prize, which will be awarded in its home state of Western Australia in September.
“It’s amazing,” says the 35-year-old of this double dip in the potential prize pool. “It was pretty mind-blowing to hear this news back to back. It’s been a good week.”
Sweet Milk Lake is a deeply personal work for Zielinski, who wrote, directed, co-produced, and stars as twin brothers Sam and Jake. There were a lot of hats to wear, making for an experience unlike anything the actor-turned-director had ever experienced on a movie set.
“It was tiring. I didn’t sit down once during the entire shoot because there isn’t a second during the day when you aren’t needed,” he says. “This is very different from being an actor.”
The hardest days were the days when the twins appeared together; Actually, of course not, thanks to the magic of old-school split-screen photography. Zielinski played each character in turn, filming against a real background until the midway point, and a stunt body appeared on a green screen for the other half of the shot. Then everything was reversed and the two performances were then edited together to create the impression that both brothers were there at the same time.
There are very few such scenes in the film, but according to Zielinski, they were “very taxing on my brain. At the time, I didn’t fully realize how torn I would feel.”
Fragmentation and doubling are at the heart of the matter. Sweet Milk Lake, It revolves around Jake’s decision to return to the country town where he grew up to visit his dying father Lee (Kieran Darcy-Smith). They haven’t seen each other for years; technically they never saw each other because the last time they were together Jake was Sarah. Lee doesn’t even know his child has transitioned from girl to boy.
When Jake arrives, he is mistaken for Sam. On the spur of the moment, he decides to let his confusion fade away. He has many reasons, but the most important of them is his desire to experience a kind of masculinity that he has only witnessed from the outside until now.
Zielinski similarly transitioned at age 24, but says “none of the story is autobiographical.” But the themes are.
“The core is what I thought a lot about [trans] visibility is about how you do all this work to transition, and you think it will be liberating – and in many ways it is – but that doesn’t mean people’s predictions will stop coming. “They will just transform,” he says.
“I’m disappointed that I pigeonholed myself [as a trans-masculine actor]the fact that he led the conversation in every field I entered – in fact, he preceded me professionally everywhere. People knew about this before I got there, and it colored everything. And I started thinking about what anonymity would look like if you moved to a town in the middle of nowhere and started over.
