With Fortescue in an ambitious transformation from an iron ore miner to a green hydrogen and clean energy company, other executives to leave have included previous chief executive Elizabeth Gaines and the head of investment company Tattarang and Minderoo, Andrew Hagger.

Launching Minderoo Pictures, Harris said the plan was to partner with the independent sector on projects that mattered to the Minderoo Foundation.

“We’re absolutely global in our ambition,” he said.

He has become executive producer of South Australia’s growing Closer Productions, best known for the film 52 Tuesdays and the TV series Aftertaste and The Hunting, and is consulting for Marta Dusseldorp and Ben Winspear’s Archipelago Productions, which made the series Bay of Fires, in Tasmania.

Malinda Wink, a former Doc Society, Good Pitch and Shark Island Institute executive, has taken over Minderoo Pictures’ slate after joining as executive director last year.

“She’s much more suited to that world of impact and philanthropy stuff,” Harris said.

Announcing Minderoo Pictures, Andrew Forrest said he believed a film could change the world.

“Awareness changes the world,” he said. “We have a planet in the process of global warming. The awareness around it is making countries everywhere sit up and take notice – politically sit up and take notice. If you’re not aware of the problem, you can sail straight into it.”

Minderoo’s initial slate included a documentary by Oscar-winning American director Louie Psihoyos on plastics.

The company also backed director Robert Connolly’s film Blueback; Honey Ant Dreamers, about the Western Desert art movement from Michael Cordell and Emily-Anyupa Butcher; and First Born, about early childhood development in Indigenous communities around the world.

Forrest told The Australian late last week that the latest executive departures came after he returned from an overseas trip to find Fortescue was not as focused on its future as a “very successful green energy, metals technology business” as he would have liked.

“You put a lighthouse on a hill and aim at it [but] there was a feeling that another lighthouse was emerging and the organisation – particularly when the chairman was overseas for three months – was being pushed towards another lighthouse,” he said.

In June, the Forrests donated 220 million Fortescue shares worth nearly $5 billion to Minderoo, bringing its endowment to about $7.6 billion. The following month they announced they were separating after 31 years of marriage but there would be “no impact on the “operations, control or direction of Fortescue, Minderoo or Tattarang”.

Email Garry Maddox at gmaddox@smh.com.au and follow him on Twitter at @gmaddox.