Matteo R. Bernardini was born in Milan, Italy, 32 years ago. He studied American literature at the Università Statale, Milan and has a Masters in Screenwriting from the University of the Sacred Heart, Milan. He worked asentertainment critic for the news website IlSussidiario.net and wrote a weekly column for the national newspaper Pubblico.

He has been a staff writer on TV documentaries and variety shows, which have aired on both RAI and Mediaset national networks. He has written for the network TV drama Agrodolce and the cable sitcom Talent High-School.

In 2011 he followed Australian director Anna McGrath to her homeland (she knows about it, don’t worry–she even married him) and has been living there ever since.

There, he started writing features. His first feature script won first prize in the Italian screenwriting competition at the Fiuggi Film Festival (2013). His second script, Cinderella Must Die, co-written with Australian screenwriter Penelope Chai, won the 2016 Script Pipeline competition. So far so good.

Penelope Chai studied cinema at the University of Melbourne before hitting the road, living and working in London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Amsterdam, Honiara, and Kakadu. She’s been nominated for three Australian Writers Guild Awards, for the feature film Mary, Mary (2016), the short She was She (2014), and documentary Love & Fury (2013). Mary, Mary also won the John Hinde Award for Best Unproduced Science Fiction Feature.

She’s writing an online series, Other People’s Problems, which will screen on Australia’s ABC in 2017. She’s also working on a science-fiction feature set thirty years after a plague has wiped out all the women. And she’s about to travel to China for a feature film project set in an empty city in Inner Mongolia.

A couple of years ago, Matteo pitched Penelope the idea of a revisionist Cinderella story. Penelope was immedia tely on board, armed and ready to dismantle Cinderella’s false mythology and give her stepsisters a voice. The result is Cinderella Must Die, an action-adventure set eight years after happily ever after.