Brietta Hague is an Australian screenwriter and film director.

Brietta’s debut drama Baltasar, which she wrote, directed and shot in Spain, premiered at the 2021 Melbourne International Film Festival where it won the Film Victoria Erwin Rado award for best short film.

The film, which portrayed a day in the life of a Senegalese migrant in Barcelona, was named best film and best screenplay at the St Kilda film festival which also named Brietta best director.

The film screened at festivals around the world and in 2022 the Australian Directors’ Guild awarded her Best Director (short film).

Among her current projects, Brietta is set to write and direct the feature film Uplift Kabul about the final days of the Afghanistan war. The film is being produced by Causeway Films and is supported in development by Screen Australia and Screen NSW.

Brietta’s filmmaking has been informed by two decades of work in various aspects of production and storytelling.

After studying playwriting and performance at Charles Sturt University, Brietta worked in casting for film productions including Spielberg’s The Pacific and Wolverine. She then moved into video-editing, journalism and documentary field production.

Brietta has been a roving director and producer for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation across the past ten years, making 30 minute documentaries about contemporary and diverse subjects like climate change in Antarctica, music in Haiti, the Mediterranean refugee crisis and Saudi social taboos.

Brietta was based in Spain for three years, freelancing as a journalist for ABC News, BBC News, Al Jazeera English, Atlantic media and Slate magazine. She produced TV reports and wrote features about some of the biggest issues and events in Europe, from terrorist attacks in France and Spain to Catalonia’s separatist movement. She also covered unique social, political and cultural stories in Morocco, Gibraltar, Côte d’Ivoire, Greece, Hungary, Romania and Estonia.  

A twelve-day workshop with Werner Herzog in Cuba emboldened her to take a break from journalism and focus on making narrative films. Brietta now employs her background in collaborative research, interviewing and story-gathering to create social-realist works of fiction.