Directed by Peter Weir • 1975 • Australia
Starring Rachel Roberts, Vivean Gray, Helen Morse
This sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath put director Peter Weir on the map and helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema. Based on an acclaimed 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK is set at the turn of the twentieth century and concerns a small group of students from an all-female college who vanish, along with a chaperone, while on a St. Valentine’s Day outing. Less a mystery than a journey into the mystic, as well as an inquiry into issues of class and sexual repression in Australian society, Weir’s gorgeous, disquieting film is a work of poetic horror whose secrets haunt viewers to this day.
Up Next in Australian New Wave
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The Last Wave
Directed by Peter Weir • 1977 • Australia
Starring Richard Chamberlain, Olivia Hamnett, GulpililRichard Chamberlain stars as Australian lawyer David Burton, who takes on the defense of a group of aborigines accused of killing one of their own. He suspects the victim has been killed for violatin...
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The Plumber
Directed by Peter Weir • 1979 • Australia
A mysterious tradesman (Ivar Kants) shows up unbidden at the home of an academic couple (Judy Morris, Robert Colby) and proceeds over the next few days to disassemble their bathroom and related fixtures. The wife seems particularly disturbed by the man's...
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My Brilliant Career
Directed by Gillian Armstrong • 1979 • Australia
Starring Judy Davis, Sam NeillFor her award-winning breakthrough film, director Gillian Armstrong drew on teenage author Miles Franklin’s novel, a celebrated turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australian coming-of-age story, to brashly upend the co...
