Bundanon presents a free weekend of seminal films from the 1980s exploring the Australian landscape and social psyche
The Boyd Education Centre is being fully transformed into a cinema with a pop-up candy bar! Pull up a beanbag, grab a beverage and snack, and settle in for a double bill screening of iconic 80s films at Bundanon.
FILM SCREENINGS
Saturday 13 July
2pm | Where the Green Ants Dream (1984, PG) directed by Werner Herzog (PG)
4pm | Bliss (1985) directed by Ray Lawrence (MA)
Sunday 14 July
2pm | Sweetie, (1989) directed by Jane Campion (M)
4pm | Razorback (1984) directed by Russell Mulcahy (M)
TICKETS
Free
CANDY BAR
Indulge in warm beverages and a curated selection of cinema snacks.
Members: Show your membership card at the pop-up candy bar to receive a special local treat and a 10% discount on snacks and drinks.
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An Aboriginal community in the Australian outback go head-to-head with a mining company, conducting research for uranium extraction on their sacred lands.
This visually arresting film shows Australia through the eyes of acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog. Though the film draws on the first native title and land rights case from 1971, it is a work of fiction.
Where the Green Ants Dream won awards for Outstanding Feature Film and Best Cinematographer at the 1984 German Film Awards and was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
The movie works its spell through the curious, sometimes strikingly beautiful images, beginning with some extraordinary, pre-credit shots of tornadoes as they form and sweep lazily – but with the destructive force of atomic bombs – across the dusty plains.– New York Times
Credits
Director: Werner Herzog. Starring: Bruce Spence, Wandjuk Marika, Roy Marika, Ray Barrett, Norman Keye. Language: English. Country of Origin: Germany.
1984, Rated PG, 100 minutes. Genre: Drama, Independent.
©Werner Herzog Film
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This celebrated debut feature by Ray Lawrence is a masterwork of bold ideas, gleefully surreal images, subversive farce and tenderness.
Following a clinical death from heart attack, Harry Joy (brilliantly played by Barry Otto) returns to life and all the certainties of his previous world have vanished. The life he had previously drifted through amiably, is in fact Hell to the re-born Harry. His wife (Lynette Curran) is in a sordid affair with his business partner, his teenage son is mixed up in drugs and incest, and all around him people are dying. It takes an angel in the form of an ex-prostitute (Helen Jones) to set him on the path to discovering bliss.
Now superbly re-mastered by the National Film and Sound Archive, as part of the NFSA Restores program, from the original 35mm film negatives.
Bliss is a key film in the story of Australian movies. … A leap away from naturalism and the historical realism of the ‘new wave’ of the 1970s, towards the modernism of the 1990s. – Paul Byrnes, Australian Screen Online
Credits
Starring: Barry Otto, Lynette Curran & Helen Jones. Director of Photography: Paul Murphy. Film Editor: Wayne Le Clos. Art Director: Owen Paterson. Costume Design: Helen Hooper. Music: Peter Best. Screenplay: Ray Lawrence & Peter Carey. Based on the Book “Bliss” By Peter Carey. Producer: Anthony Buckley. Director: Ray Lawrence
1985, Rated M, 1h 52m. Genre: Comedy, Drama.
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Jane Campion’s stunning debut feature, Sweetie, focuses on the hazardous relationship between the buttoned-down, superstitious Kay and her rampaging, devil-may-care sister, “Sweetie”, and by extension, their entire family’s rotten roots.
A feast of colourful photography and captivating, idiosyncratic characters, the tough and tender Sweetie heralded the emergence of this gifted director as well as the breakthrough of Australian cinema, which would take the international film world by storm.
The world of Sweetie – a beautifully strange and compelling film debut – is bent out of shape with almost intangibly subtle precision. – The Guardian
Sweetie looks like a small movie, and in every measurable way it is, but it possesses remarkable strength and tenacity. It is funny, though one doesn’t often laugh at it, and sad, without ever asking for tears. Instead, it demands that it be taken on its own spare terms without regard to the sentimental conventions of other movies. At its best, it is audaciously unreasonable. – The New York Times
Credits
Director: Jane Campion. Writers: Gerard Lee, Jane Campion. Stars: Geneviève Lemon, Karen Colston, Tom Lycos.
1989, Rated M, 1h 37m. Genre: Drama, Comedy.
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Somewhere deep in the Australian outback there’s an indestructible creature that can rip a man in half and destroy a homestead in seconds.
Nine hundred pounds of tusk and muscle hell-bent on terrorizing the small, isolated community of Gamulla, a town as violent and primitive as the beast that threatens it.
The astonishing debut feature from Russell Mulcahy, Razorback is a ferociously entertaining, adrenaline pumping thriller that counts Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino among its self-confessed fans. Taking brutal inspiration from Lindsay Chamberlain’s highly publicized 1980 case, Razorback is an Ozploitation classic, bloodcurdling to the last squeal.
Razorback is a work of gut-busting visual bravado…. For a country known for its great outdoors and vicious wildlife, Australia has made few movies about humans fighting animals for survival… Razorback, or “Jaws on trotters”, will be hard to beat. – The Guardian
Nature’s nightmare is reflected darkly through the razorback’s burning, merciless eyes, and audiences will have trouble looking away…Most of all, buried beneath the ecological dread and creature mayhem is a visual poem about the outback, which has never looked so equally surreal and stark. – bloody-disgusting.com
Credits
Director: Russell Mulcahy. Cast: Arkie Whiteley, Bill Kerr, David Argue, Gregory Harrison, Judy Morris. Cinematography: Dean Semler. Writer: Everett DeRoche. Special effects: Bob McCarron.
1984, Rated M, 95 minutes. Genre: Horror.