Australian Coming-of-age movies

The world is closing in on Greta Driscoll. On the cusp of turning fifteen she can't bear to leave her childhood, it contains all the things that give her comfort in this incomprehensible new world. She floats in a bubble of loserdom with her only friend Elliott, until her parents throw her a surprise 15th birthday party and she's flung into a parallel place; a world that's weirdly erotic, a little bit violent and thoroughly ludicrous - only there can she find herself.

A terminally ill teen upsets her parents when she falls in love with a small-time drug dealer.

A pair of teenagers in Western Australia looking to escape the monotony of life in a small town take up surfing lessons from a guy named Sando.

Mike has felt alienated and alone for as long as he can remember, until a new boy arrives at his school - awakening feelings and a world of possibilities he'd never before dared to dream of.

Sixteen-year-old Billie’s reluctant path to independence is accelerated when her mother reveals plans for gender transition, and their time together becomes limited to Tuesdays. This emotionally charged story of desire, responsibility, and transformation was filmed over the course of a year—once a week, every week, only on Tuesdays.

Lore leads her four younger siblings across a war-torn Germany in 1945. Amidst the chaos she encounters a mysterious refugee who shatters her fragile reality with hatred and desire.

Australian teenager Heidi is left with little choice but to leave home after she's caught red-handed with her mother's boyfriend. With few options, Heidi ends up in Jindabyne, a tourist community. Upon meeting Joe at a bar, she pursues a relationship with him and tries to find something resembling a normal home life. Heidi makes small strides by getting a job and finding a place to stay, but her relationship with Joe must overcome more than its share of hurdles.

Jim Craig has lived his first 18 years in the mountains of Australia on his father's farm. The death of his father forces him to go to the low lands to earn enough money to get the farm back on its feet. Kirk Douglas plays two roles as twin brothers who haven't spoken for years, one of whom was Jim's father's best friend and the other of whom is the father of the girl he wants to marry.

Thomas is turning 16. His dad's in the army and they've just moved to a town in New South Wales; his mom is pregnant; his older brother, Charlie, who's autistic, has his own adolescent sexual issues. Thomas finds Charlie an embarrassment in public, so when Thomas is attracted to Jackie, a girl in his swim class, Charlie presents any number of obstacles when she drops by their house, when the three of them go for a walk, and during a family birthday dinner. Can Thomas find a way to enter the world of teen romance and still be his brother's keeper, or is Charlie's disability going to prove more than Thomas can handle?

Under the pretense of having a picnic, a geologist takes his teenage daughter and 6-year-old son into the Australian outback and attempts to shoot them. When he fails, he turns the gun on himself, and the two city-bred children must contend with harsh wilderness alone. They are saved by a chance encounter with an Aborigine boy who shows them how to survive, and in the process underscores the disharmony between nature and modern life.

Seventeen talented Australian directors from diverse artistic disciplines each create a chapter of the hauntingly beautiful novel by multi award-winning author Tim Winton. The linking and overlapping stories explore the extraordinary turning points in ordinary people’s lives in a stunning portrait of a small coastal community. As characters face second thoughts and regret, relationships irretrievably alter, resolves are made or broken, and lives change direction forever.

James Hayes is a small town police man who is called to the local cemetery in the middle of the night after six people have inexplicably risen from the dead in perfect health. With no memory of their identities, they are determined to discover who they are and what has happened to them. James recognises one of them and along with local doctor Elishia Glass, struggles to keep the case hidden from his colleagues, his family and the world. The six people are all linked in some way and the search begins for someone who knows the truth about how and why they have returned.

When a high school party goes dangerously off the rails, one teenager finds that revenge is just a computer click away.

The true story of Australia's cat-and-mouse underground mine warfare—one of the most misunderstood, misrepresented and mystifying conflicts of WW I. It was secret struggle BENEATH the Western Front that combined daring engineering, technology and science. Few on the surface knew of the brave, claustrophobic and sometimes barbaric work of these tunnellers.

In 1950s Australia, beautiful, talented dressmaker Tilly returns to her tiny hometown to right wrongs from her past. As she tries to reconcile with her mother, she starts to fall in love while transforming the fashion of the town.

Jack is a charismatic larrikin who has just discovered the one thing he's really good at — go-kart racing. With the support of his mentor, Patrick, an old race car driver with a secret past, and his best mates Colin and Mandy, Jack must learn to control his recklessness if he is to defeat the best drivers in Australia, including the ruthless champion Dean, and win the National title.

There are dysfunctional families... and then there are the Conways. After a family tragedy, 15-year-old Billy Conway has become the de facto glue between his bitter mom, distant brother, and stoic dad. But when Billy starts to act out, everything changes for him and his family

Karla, a young medical student, is trying to cure her brother, Blake, from a terminal sleep illness called Fatal Familial Insomnia, where you are unable to sleep until you die. On her quest to treat him, a more sinister reason for his condition is revealed.

South Africa, 1978. Tim Jenkin and Stephen Lee, two white political activists from the African National Congress imprisoned by the apartheid regime, put a plan in motion to escape from the infamous Pretoria Prison.

Fourteen year old Nim, more determined than ever to protect her island and all the wildlife that call it home, faces off against resort developers and animal poachers. Soon she realizes she can’t depend on her animal cohorts alone and must make her first human friend – Edmund, who’s run away to the island from the mainland – to save her home.

Locked up for a minor crime, 19 year old JR quickly learns the harsh realities of prison life. Protection, if you can get it, is paramount. JR soon finds himself under the watchful eye of Australia's most notorious criminal, Brendan Lynch, but protection comes at a price.

An innocent Cambodian boy is sold to a Thai broker and enslaved on a fishing trawler. As fellow slaves are tortured and murdered around him, he starts to wonder if his only hope of freedom is to become as violent as his captors.

A young Aboriginal boy is torn between his unexpected love of acting and the disintegration of his family.

When a pop-star cousin comes to stay, a family's once normal life changes drastically.

For many years, four teenage orphans at an Australian outback convent have watched their younger comrades find new parents, and realize that they may never be adopted. The Reverend Mother sends the four boys away on a seaside vacation, where they meet Teresa and Fearless, a couple who would make perfect parents. The youths compete with one another to be the one Teresa and Fearless decide to adopt.

Two years into an intergalactic invasion of Earth, survivors in Sydney, Australia, fight back in a desperate ground war. As casualties mount by the day, the resistance and their unexpected allies, uncover a plot that could see the war come to a decisive end. With the Alien invaders hell-bent on making earth their new home, the race is on to save mankind.

Three detectives become embroiled in a tense struggle after a tragic accident that leaves a child in critical condition. One is guilty of a crime, one will try to cover it up, and the other attempts to expose it. How far will these men go to disguise and unravel the truth?

When teenagers JOSH (Louis Corbett) and LING (Li Lin Jin) join their respective parents, CHRIS (Sam Neill) and Dr LI (Wang Ji) on an archaeological dig in China they encounter something trapped beneath a temple beyond their wildest imagination. A real live Chinese dragon. Two thousand years earlier, to defend his kingdom, the dragon lent an emperor his all powerful pearl. Instead of being returned, the pearl was buried with the emperor beneath his palace, and helpless without its source of power the dragon has remained entombed ever since.

In 1989, known as Mendax, Julian Assange and two friends formed a group called the International Subversives. Using early home computers and defining themselves as white hat hackers - those who look but don’t steal – they broke into some of the world’s most powerful and secretive organisations. In the eyes of the US Government, they were a major threat to national security.

Martin, a mercenary, is sent from Europe by an anonymous biotech company to the Tasmanian wilderness on a hunt for the last Tasmanian tiger.

Explores the early events leading up to Red Dog's discovery on the road to Dampier, and his ultimate rise from ordinary dog to Australian legend.

A woman grieving over the death of her daughter loses grip of reality when she begins to think her girl may still be alive.

An indigenous detective returns to the Outback to investigate the murder of a young girl.

Beneath the placid facade of Canberra, amidst rising tension between China and America, senior political journalist Harriet Dunkley uncovers a secret city of interlocked conspiracies, putting innocent lives in danger including her own.

Our lady sleuth sashays through the back lanes and jazz clubs of late 1920’s Melbourne, fighting injustice with her pearl handled pistol and her dagger sharp wit. Leaving a trail of admirers in her wake, our thoroughly modern heroine makes sure she enjoys every moment of her lucky life. Based on author Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher Murder Mystery novels.

Everything seems uneventful for Dean and Claire, as they head out into beautiful rural Australia for a weekend away. Their biggest problem is what to do about Claire being accepted into an interstate University. The couple come across Knuck and things start to spiral out of control. Heath and Jarred only stoke the fire and both Claire and Dean's greatest fears are made reality.

10 years after a global economic collapse, a hardened loner pursues the men who stole his car through the lawless wasteland of the Australian outback, aided by the brother of one of the thieves.

American high school sweethearts, Wade and Lisa, travel to Australia to experience nature at its finest. As their relationship strains, they head inland to Uluru, navigating remote dirt roads with an unreliable GPS. Soon, they find themselves stranded and ill- prepared and, with only each other to rely on, the two are driven to extremes in order to stay alive in the harsh and unforgiving Outback.

A mysterious woman is perched between the harsh legacy of World War II and the hope of a new life in Australia. A sweeping romantic drama set in 1950s rural Australia following the lives of the Blighs, a wealthy and complicated pastoralist family, who lives in Inverness, NSW.

Dylan discovers he has a knack for making paper planes. He has a chance to compete in a world championship, but he'll have to help rally his grieving dad, Jack, and face bullies and self-doubt to do so.

When a solar eclipse sends a colossal blast of super chilled air towards the earth, it then sets off a catastrophic chain of events that threatens to engulf the world in ice and begin a new Ice Age.

In 2007, in the midst of the drought and water shortages, the NSW State government has unveiled plans to tap into and recycle millions of litres of water trapped in a network of abandoned train tunnels just beneath the heart of Sydney. However the government suddenly goes cold on the plan and it is not made public why. There is talk of homeless people who use the tunnel as shelter going missing, even though the government states that there are no homeless people in there. This, and the silence from the officials and ministers, leads a journalist, Natasha to begin an investigation into a government cover-up. She and her crew Pete (Producer), Steve (Cameraman) and Tangles (Sound Technichian) decide to investigate the story in the tunnel.

Cane Toads: The Conquest is a comic yet provocative account of Australia’s most notorious environmental blunder from filmmaker Mark Lewis.Shot against the harsh and beautiful landscape of northern Australia, Cane Toads: The Conquest tracks the unstoppable journey of the toad across the continent. Director Mark Lewis (Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, The Natural History of the Chicken) injects his trademark irreverence and humor into the story as he follows a trail of human conflict, bizarre culture and extraordinary close encounters.Filmed with high-resolution 3D technology, Cane Toads is the first Australian digital 3D feature film.  Custom designed equipment allows viewers to get up close and personal with these curious creatures like never before. The unique viewing experience is like being immersed in the world of the toad.

The uncensored story of one of Australia's most successful bands, INXS. A story of mateship, a story of success and excess, talent and sheer bloody will, set to a pulsating soundtrack including all of INXSs greatest hits.

Adapted from the bestselling novel by Madeleine St John, Ladies in Black is an alluring and tender-hearted comedy drama about the lives of a group of department store employees in 1959 Sydney.

This pulse-racing real-life adventure follows two of Australia's greatest surf legends on their quest to hunt down and ride the Pacific's biggest and most dangerous waves. With 3D cameras installed on their boards, Ross Clarke-Jones and Tom Carroll defy middle age by pushing the limits of what they — and cinema technology — can do. (TIFF)

Young, charismatic, and hardworking, Sparra Farrell seems to be sailing into a happy, respectable life. He has a solid job and an adorable fiancée named Paula, and already owns a modest house in the country outside Melbourne. The only odd thing is that Sparra says precious little about his past — but that past is about to catch up with him, and wrest control of his present.

After moving to a small town, Zach Cooper finds a silver lining when he meets next door neighbor Hannah, the daughter of bestselling Goosebumps series author R.L. Stine. When Zach unintentionally unleashes real monsters from their manuscripts and they begin to terrorize the town, it’s suddenly up to Stine, Zach and Hannah to get all of them back in the books where they belong.

Barry is a talented mechanic and family man whose life is torn apart on the eve of a zombie apocalypse. His sister, Brooke, is kidnapped by a sinister team of gas-mask wearing soldiers & experimented on by a psychotic doctor. While Brooke plans her escape Barry goes out on the road to find her & teams up with Benny, a fellow survivor - together they must arm themselves and prepare to battle their way through hordes of flesh-eating monsters in a harsh Australian bushland.

In the early 1900s, Miranda attends a girls boarding school in Australia. One Valentine's Day, the school's typically strict headmistress treats the girls to a picnic field trip to an unusual but scenic volcanic formation called Hanging Rock. Despite rules against it, Miranda and several other girls venture off. It's not until the end of the day that the faculty realizes the girls and one of the teachers have disappeared mysteriously.