Australia

“The first phase is hallucinogenic… the second phase is glandular… and the third phase is… BODY MELT.”

Synopsis:
from original 1993 press-kit

Injected With an experimental drug, the research chemist Ryan (Robert Simper) leaves a mysterious rural health farm and drives to the outer-city suburb of Hornesville, As Ryan’s body starts to deteriorate and his driving becomes more erratic, a cruising police car starts to chase him. Charging towards a group of houses in Pebbles Court, Homesville, Ryan leaves a cryptic message on his dictaphone: “The first phase is hallucinogenic … The second phase is glandular… The third phase is …”Read More »

A masterpiece of observational ethnographic cinema style.
An Australian feature length documentary about a poverty stricken family living in a squatter’s dwelling in Manila, Phillipines. Doc is set during a three month period and tells the story of two parents with two little children who must sell cigarettes to survive. Ethnographic and anthropological film shows the crises the impoverished family must face and is the winner of a number of awards.Read More »

Quote:
“The old woman has just come from attending a funeral and knows her own is not far in the future. She is speaking with the young nurse who visits her daily. The actress, Sheila Florance, could be describing herself. She is bone thin, her arms like sticks, her face deeply lined. She was once a great beauty, but now what she has left is character.Read More »

Synopsis
An intimate access to the private life of Courtney Barnett, an anti-influencer who is a powerful voice for our times.Read More »

Beautiful Kate is the story of a family whose all too human mistakes lead to tragedy, recrimination, guilt and finally salvation. Told in parallel strands of past and present, the film recounts the sexual awakening of three siblings growing up in isolation, interwoven with the emotional journey of reconciliation between an estranged father and son. Beautiful Kate is based on the Newton Thornburg novel.Read More »

VARIETY – Warwick Thornton’s eye-opening doc about the cultural roots of the Southern Cross constellation is quintessentially Australian

At once benignly mischievous and profoundly serious, “We Don’t Need a Map,” the new documentary by “Samson & Delilah” director Warwick Thornton, explores the Southern Cross constellation, culturally integral to Australia’s indigenous peoples and inevitably massaged and reinterpreted by the white Europeans who later settled the continent. As such it is a pertinent message for the director’s countrymen and an eye-opening lesson for the world about the proud history and ongoing racial tensions that currently form the crux of the Australian experience.Read More »

Characters adrift in an isolated landscape collide with the past and each other as they unravel the secrets of a dead man’s dreams. A moody meditation on anti-heroism, the film pays tribute to the black and white style of cinema noir.Read More »

An essay film, staged as a short drama deploying a first person, diary film narration over exquisitely designed object oriented “still life” tableaus, Gillian Leahy’s My Life Without Steve (1986) was a sensational hit in the mid-1980s. It won the Grand Prix and the Irwin Rado Award for Best Australian Film at the Melbourne International Film Festival, and the General Category of the Greater Union Awards (today’s Dendy Awards) at the Sydney Film Festival. The film screened widely and generated passionate debate.Read More »

Lucy is a young university student possessed by a kind of radical passivity. She lets a flip of a coin decide the outcome of a random sexual encounter and she displays an uncomplaining patience when facing the repetitions of her various menial jobs that fund her studies. One day she answers an ad in the student newspaper and interviews for a job to be a lingerie waitress. But she is secretly being initiated into a world of strange new work; one where she will have to give into absolute submission to her clients by being sedated; becoming a Sleeping Beauty. Eventually this unnerving experience begins to bleed into her daily life and she finally develops the will to break the spell by discovering what happens to her while she sleeps. With a fearless performance by Browning, Leigh creates a bold cinematic vision; one where Lucy, both in her clandestine sexual adventures and in her mundane daily existence, lives with the same unflinching and brutal honesty.Read More »