They are largely Indigenous children whose future is looking decidedly shaky. From a young age they are in trouble with the law for a variety of offences. Breaking into homes and stealing money and valuables, they play the system. Often, they are immediately bailed, only to rinse and repeat. Then, in many cases, incarceration follows….
We are confronted by distressing imagery of natural disasters and the aftermath of war, where nothing remains but the grey shell of homes that once were. In contemporary terms, think Gaza, the Ukraine and Russia. This, on a large scale, on a big screen, begins a more intimate portrayal of the impact of devastation. A…
Innovative and highly creative, east meets west in playwright Shane Woon’s love story about Chinese gods and AFL football. The Rabbit in the title is the Rabbit God Tu’er Shen (played by Sean Yuen Halley), the patron saint of queer people. Watson (Anton Pan-Cassin) is a budding AFL player, at age 22 on his last…
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is an epic retelling of one of the oldest surviving works of ancient Greek literature. Homer composed the poem Odyssey in the 8th or 7th centuries BC. It concerns the exploits of the king of Ithaca, Odysseus (Matt Damon), as he attempts to make his way home many years after the…
Beautifully shot in Sápmi, the traditional homeland of the Sámi, the indigenous people of the Arctic, Árru is a slow burn, intense drama about deeply buried trauma. It concerns a family of reindeer herders whose ancestral land and livelihood is being threatened by a copper mining project. Single mother Maia (Sara Marielle Gaup Beaska) and…
The global refugee crisis is brought into sharp focus in a tightly wound, suspenseful drama based around a family holiday. The attention is on Danish school teacher Mikkel (Esben Smed) and his workaholic health ministry official wife, Louise (Danica Curcic). They have taken their two young daughters, 11-year-old Sille (Sif Lucca Gersby) and Ella (Chili…
Relationships can be complicated beasts. That is shown up in all its tangled glory (well, not so much glory) in Four Play. Rafe (Anthony Jacobsen) and Pete (Reuby Chip), both virgins when they met at university, have been in an exclusive relationship for seven and a half years. That’s when Pete puts forward an unusual…
A prolific, iconic writer and feminist who lived life on her terms, Miles Franklin (14th October, 1879 – 19th September, 1954) is best known for her auspicious debut, My Brilliant Career. Her legacy lives on through her published works and with the announcement of the annual Miles Franklin Literary Award to a novel of literary…
Living in Paris, American/French psychiatrist Lilian Steiner’s (Jodie) life is spiralling. A patient she has seen for eight years, Pierre Hallan (Noam Morgensztern), who originally came to see her to quit smoking, abruptly cancels all future appointments. Pierre claims one visit to a hypnotist cured what Steiner couldn’t and he maintains that he is 40,000…
Newly crafted multi-millionaire Ariel (Tom Stokes) struck up a conversation with the exotic, mysterious, attractive Anna X (Becca Galvin) at a party in New York in 2016. From there, he couldn’t get enough of her. In short, he was smitten from the get go. In her early to mid twenties, Anna proved to be aloof,…
