A haunting tale of a family in extremis, based on her own novel

And the actual story is … ??? Forget about the novel. Most producers won’t have read it. And with a logline this weak, they won’t be inspired to either. Assume the reader reads only comic books [quite true in LA) and get to telling him or her the story. Stop plugging the novel and tell us what the film is actually ABOUT.
Steven Fernandez (Judge)

“A haunting tale of a family in extremis, based on her own novel.”

It baffles me that a project with this logline can be successful in soliciting government funding.

In Australia, way too many novels are adapted into films purely on the merit that they were novels that sold. There is no guarantee whatsoever that anyone will be interested in this, let alone that it be adapted appropriately.
This is an extremely lazy logline, not even attempting to give us a hint of what the concept is about.

All I can smell is that we have yet another film that fits under no umbrella other than ‘drama’. And the poster will probably have all the family member looking away from us, none making eye contact.

I am not saying the script underlying this logline is poor, only that whoever has been involved in getting it to this stage has not made the effort to think of the audience, and craft a selling logline.

To me, this logline is symptomatic for the generally poor understanding of screen concepts and audience marketing among the government film financing gatekeepers in Australia.