Richard Brennan

As Australian cinema broke through to international audiences in the 1970s through respected art house films like Peter Weir's "Picnic At Hanging Rock," a new underground of low-budget exploitation filmmakers were turning out considerably less highbrow fare. Documentary filmmaker Mark Hartley explores this unbridled era of sex and violence, complete with clips from some of the scene's most outrageous flicks and interviews with the renegade filmmakers themselves.

As notions of civil rights transformed across the world, so was the screen landscape reformed by the ascension of grassroots film movements seeking to challenge the mainstream. Some aspired to push form to its limit; others worked to destabilise what they saw as a homogenous industry, or to provoke questions around gender, sexuality, migration and race.

At a remote guest house known as Homesdale, a group of visitors find themselves subjected to strange rituals, psychological games, and increasingly cruel entertainments devised by the lodge’s staff. As the weekend unfolds, the tensions and obsessions each guest has brought with them begin to surface.

A documentary about the making of Gillian Armstrong's 1982 film STARSTRUCK.

A Sydney teen tries to make it as a rock singer, with help from her odd 14-year-old cousin.

Wallace is an efficiency expert, managing the high-profile downsizing of a major auto parts factory. But when he is hired to evaluate a small moccasin factory which seems from another era, Wallace has to reconsider the rapid modernization he advocates, as he is confronted by the human faces such plans hurt.

Lewis, a young amateur theater director, is offered a job with a governmental program for the rehabilitation of mentally ill patients in a Sydney institution. His project is overrun by one of the patients, who wants to stage the opera Cosi Fan Tutte by Mozart, despite the fact that none of the patients can sing or speak Italian. A comedy of errors ensues, but one which unifies the patients and their director in unexpected ways.

A schoolteacher (John Waters) becomes obsessed with the idea that his wife (Joy Bell) did not die in a car accident, as everyone else thinks.

Ron Ryan is accused of a murder he did not commit. As his family races to prove his innocence, he and a priest aim for redemption.

A man tries to rehabilitate his alcoholic friend by entering them both into the Australian national rowing championships.

Filmed in the Clare Valley, Gladstone and the Flinders Ranges in South Australia, this prison movie was inspired by the true life prison riot at Bathurst Jail in 1974 and its subsequent Royal Commission into New South Wales Prisons.