About the artist

Actress, filmmaker, and painter Bridie Latona grew up in an off grid, glass panelled house in Australia's Nightcap Rainforest, the location that inspired Disney's "FernGully," where she spent much of her childhood rescuing distressed animals and nursing them back to health.

After a BA in Acting at QUT, further study at The Actor's Studio in New York, and directing training at AFTRS, Latona went on to star in film and theatre productions in London, where she was awarded Best Actress at the Rob Knox Film Festival and Best Actress & Best Director at the Warner Bros. New Filmmakers Awards. She wrote, produced, and co-directed the multi awarded films "A Brunette Kiss" and "Bridge Over Blue," winning Best Director at the Rob Knox Film Festival for the latter. Dreaming Tree Pictures. She recently directed, wrote, produced, and starred in "Edge of the Earth," made under the guidance of multi Oscar winning director Jane Campion and starring Anthony Hayes.. The film has screened at the Three Fires International Festival, Love Notes in Ottawa, the Byron Bay International Film Festival, and the Toronto Lift Off Festival.

The real life inspiration for art and feature film 'Buttercup' reaches back to when she was seven years old and helped save a neighbor's distressed birthing cow. As the adults tended to the dying mother, it fell to Bridie to welcome the newborn calf into the world; she laid its head in her lap and fell instantly in love with its sweetness and fragility. "I was never able to see a cow in a distant field as just a product ever again." Hearing the anguished cries of mother cows separated from their calves on a neighboring dairy farm, and feeling their grief as her own, solidified what has become a lifelong mission to care for innocent animals.

Years later, living in Ireland beside a herd of cows during the pandemic, she sang to them daily and sat and ate beside them, until one afternoon, looking down at a buttercup flower in the grass, the whole story arrived at once, and she ran inside to write it down. Buttercup follows a young vegan girl who, together with the dairy farmer's son next door, rescues one of the calves. Over three years on the 600 acre Irish castle estate where she lived, Lisnavagh House, Latona worked as the key adviser guiding its transformation from a beef farm into a plant based eco and art retreat, a shift that happened "through friendship, shared vegan meals, and seeing the way I loved the animals' souls, not a product." She has also worked with Farm Transitions Australia, and much of what she has learned has woven its way into the ending of Buttercup, showing viable alternatives that let farms move away from animal agriculture, among them rewilded farm stays, eco tourism, and creative hubs for the community.

"This is why I make films and why I paint. A person can be handed every fact about an animal's life and remain where they are. Story goes in through the heart, and the heart is what moves a culture toward compassion. That is the work, one animal, seen closely enough to be loved, until the whole world is looked at that way."

That same instinct, toward warmth, toward attention, toward seeing the soul rather than the surface, shapes her paintings. Bridie works with oil on linen, building each piece quiet, luminous, and one careful layer at a time. Her art depicts images of how safe, beautiful, and peaceful a world that is safe for animals and children would be. Her series Sanctuary is drawn from real life moments with animals, and a vision in which the whole world is a sanctuary.

She is now creating the Dreaming Tree Sanctuary, an eco creative retreat and animal sanctuary featuring a farm to table vegan cafe and food forest, eco cabins, a music recording studio, and an art studio, which will also serve as the set for her series of vegan themed feature films, including Buttercup.

She is committed to using film and art to spread a message of environmental conservation and compassion for animals, children and the soft at heart.