Craig Lahiff was an Australian film director.
Born in 1947, he first studied science at Adelaide University, before going on to complete a masters degree in arts in film at Flinders University, where he produced a dissertation (submitted in 1981) titled 'The Use of Critical Path Analysis in Film Production' (details via Trove).
Shortly after graduation, Lahiff was involved (as a sound engineer, rather than a director) in a series of interviews with Australian women artists under the aegis of the Art Gallery of South Australia. Released under such titles as Pursuit of Excellence and Pride and Prejudice, the series involved the work of other film-makers who would go on to work extensively with Lahiff or forge their own wide-ranging careers, including Terry Jennings (as producer), Scott Hicks (as director), Andrew Prowse (as film editor), and David Foreman (as director of photography).
Lahiff's first independent film was the short spy drama Labyrinth (1979). Made under the auspices of the Experimental Film and Television Fund, it followed two German spies working in isolation during World War II, until one is murdered by a disgraced Irish captain seeking restoration.
He followed this with The Coming (1981), a science-fiction thriller in which a bored corporate executive starts fearing that a pattern of strange weather phenomena means a coming apocalypse.
Lahiff's first major film as a director/script-writer–and the film often cited as his first film–was made six years later: Coda. Another genre film, Coda followed a series of mysterious attacks on women university students, and was partly filmed at Flinders University. It was co-written with Terry Jennings, and included such actresses as Penny Cook, Arna-Maria Winchester, and Olivia Hamnett.
Coda was followed by crime thrillers Fever (1988), Strangers (1991), and Ebbtide (1994).
In 1997 came Lahiff's best-known film: Heaven's Burning, in which a bank robber finds himself saddled with a reluctant Japanese honeymooner, faking her own kidnapping to escape an arranged marriage. Lahiff directed the film to a Louis Nowra script.
Lahiff made only two more films after Heaven's Burning: Black and White (a dramatic re-creation of the 1958 trial of Arrernte man Max Stuart for murder) and Swerve (another of the crime thrillers/road movies in which Lahiff specialised). Black and White was nominated for AFI Awards for acting and costume design (winning one for acting) and an FCCA Award for script-writing. Swerve attracted AFI and ASSG Award nominations for sound.
Lahiff died following a short illness.
