Australian films about colonization

Vietnam War, 1966. Australia and New Zealand send troops to support the United States and South Vietnamese in their fight against the communist North. Soldiers are very young men, recruits and volunteers who have never been involved in a combat. On August 18th, members of Delta Company will face the true horror of a ruthless battle among the trees of a rubber plantation called Long Tân. They are barely a hundred. The enemy is a human wave ready to destroy them.

An Australian urban legend comes screaming on the Ozploitation scene. It’s said that if you drive down the creepy road of Lemon Tree Passage, and witness a sudden flash of light in the trees, you'll be forever haunted by the tormented spirit of a man killed by thrill speeding teenagers. Wanting to put this old wives’ tale to the test, a car-load of non-believers take the supposedly cursed journey and do indeed see a strange manifestation. But it’s not the one of popular myth - this sudden possession of one of their number involves another altogether more shocking crime. That of a young girl raped and murdered on the same stretch of highway. As one urban legend trumps another, the scared passengers must sort out the facts of both cases before vengeful justice from beyond the grave can be meted out with moody atmosphere, ghostly thrills and supernatural suspense.

A woman struggles with her son's illness and her husband's infidelity, but, after a chance encounter with an Irish sailor and his son, her life is turned upside down in a love story that defies explanation and breaks all the rules.

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.

In 1825, Claire, a 21-year-old Irish convict, chases a British soldier through the rugged Tasmanian wilderness, bent on revenge for a terrible act of violence he committed against her family. She enlists the services of an Aboriginal tracker who is also marked by trauma from his own violence-filled past.

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.

Laura and Tyler are best friends and drinking buddies whose hedonistic existence falls under the creeping horror of adulthood when Laura gets engaged to Jim – an ambitious pianist who surprisingly decides to go teetotal.

What would you do on the last day on Earth? With the end of the world only hours away, the self-absorbed James heads to the ultimate party-to-end-all-parties. On his way there, he saves the life of a young girl named Rose who is searching desperately for her missing father. This simple act sets James on a path to redemption.

Life's gone pear-shaped for Jack Irish (Guy Pearce). He's back to takeaway Chinese for one after his girlfriend Linda (Marta Dusseldorp) abandoned him for a career in Sydney, a flashy Brisvegas type is muscling in on the racetrack action, and his cabinet-making still leaves a lot to be desired. So when an old teammate of his dad's turns up looking for help, it's a welcome distraction for Jack. Des Connors' (Ron Jacobson) son Gary (Nicholas Coghlan) has gone missing, having nicked off with all Des's money. But sometimes prodigal sons go AWOL for a reason. As Jack begins to dig he discovers Gary was a man with something to hide and a very good reason to disappear - or be disappeared. .

Holly Rowe's retiring, kissing her callgirl life goodbye. She just has to get through her last night on the job. Shay Ryan's a teenage runaway, broke and alone. She just has to get through her first night as a hooker. Then fate throws them together on a job that goes horribly wrong and they're trapped on an out-of-control roller coaster ride, through the twilight zone of sex-for-sale. X is a sizzling adults-only thriller about love, chance, escape and the oldest profession experienced by two women, on a night that will change their lives forever.

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?

Over the course of one night, Sarah meets the handsome, captivating and smooth talking Lewis, who aims to be the bait in a sick sexual trap set up by himself and his low-life, rich kid housemate Kenneth. When their ruse backfires, Lewis and Sarah are forced into an unlikely alliance with deadly consequences.

Reg and Lindsay run an organic fertiliser business. They need a fresh supply of their "secret ingredient" to process through the meat grinder. Reg comes across two guys and a girl with a broken-down vehicle on their way to a music festival.

A remake of 'Reservoir Dogs' by Quentin Tarantino, with the noticeable difference that all the male characters have been replaced with female ones.

In this cunning mystery-horror hybrid, college student Ben inherits a curious old mechanical box that churns out voodoo dolls. When a shadowy figure starts using the box to murder Ben's friends, Ben must find the killer.

Big Mamma's Boy follows the story of Rocco as he struggles to choose between the love of his life, Katie and his doting, over-protective Italian mother. Fun, heart-wrenching and poignant, this spirited romantic comedy explores Australia's multicultural nuances with hilarious results and goes to show that being a big mamma's boy is a lot tougher than it sounds.

A group of elite soldiers sent to infiltrate and extract the lead science team from Pine Gap, Australia's top secret underground military compound, after it comes under attack from unknown forces. The mission is compromised when they encounter a young woman with no memory of who she is or how she came to be there. As they try to escape, the group quickly discovers all is not as it seems and the facility has become a testing ground for something far more sinister.

An adventure-loving couple convince their friends to explore a remote, uncharted cave system in the forests of Northern Australia. With a tropical storm approaching, they abseil into the mouth of the cave, but when the caves start to flood, tensions rise as oxygen levels fall and the friends find themselves trapped. Unknown to them, the storm has also brought in a pack of dangerous and hungry crocodiles.

Based on true events, 16 year-old Jamie falls in with his mother's new boyfriend and his crowd of self-appointed neighborhood watchmen, a relationship that leads to a spree of torture and murder.

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)

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.

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.

Detectives Tori Lustigman and Nick Manning are assigned a brutal murder case in Bondi, where they begin to uncover mounting evidence to suggest the killing is connected to a spate of unexplained deaths, "suicides" and disappearances throughout the 80s and 90s. Haunted by the disappearance of her teenage brother, Tori's fascination with the case soon turns to fixation. When more ritualistic murders occur with the same bizarre signature, Tori and Nick will need to put their relationships, their careers and their lives on the line to finally reveal the truth.

To escape the outback, a young Afghan cameleer falls in with a mysterious bushman on the run with stolen Crown gold.

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.

Lured by the promise of an Australian holiday, backpackers Rutger, Katarina, and Paul visit the notorious Wolf Creek Crater. Their dream Outback adventure soon becomes a horrific reality when they encounter the site’s most infamous local, the last man any traveler to the region ever wants to meet; Mick Taylor (John Jarratt). As the backpackers flee, Mick pursues them on an epic white knuckled rampage across hostile wasteland. Only one will remain to be dragged back to his lair to witness the true magnitude of his monstrosity. And if the last man standing is to have any hope of surviving where no one else has survived before, he’ll have to use every ounce of cunning to outwit the man behind the monster and become every bit as ruthless as the monster inside the man.

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.

Griff, office worker by day, superhero by night, has his world turned upside down when he meets Melody, a beautiful young scientist who shares his passion for the impossible.

The series follows two complete strangers, Lola and Chelsea, who intervene in a fatal carjacking while waiting at a suburban bus stop, and are subsequently thrust into a chase from authorities across Australia with a vehicle filled with cash. The strangers must rely solely on each other while they are on the run.

Harry and Beth wanted a different kind of holiday so they chartered a boat to drop them off on a remote coral island on the Great Barrier Reef. The island was idyllic, surrounded by a wide reef, covered in palms and full of birds and other wildlife. It was small and totally deserted or so they thought. But when things go missing from their camp site and they discover someone else's footprints in the sand this quickly becomes disturbing as they realize the island has a ghost! Inspired by actual events.

A freak tsunami traps shoppers at a coastal Australian supermarket inside the building ... along with a 12-foot great white shark.

A comedy about a groom and his three best men who travel to the Australian outback for a wedding.

A five-year-old Indian boy gets lost on the streets of Calcutta, thousands of kilometers from home. He survives many challenges before being adopted by a couple in Australia; 25 years later, he sets out to find his lost family.

Four friends lose themselves in a carefree South-East Asian holiday. Only three come back. Dave and Alice return home to their young family desperate for answers about Jeremy's mysterious disappearance. When Alice's sister Steph returns not long after, a nasty secret is revealed about the night her boyfriend went missing. But it is only the first of many. Who amongst them knows what happened on that fateful night when they were dancing under a full moon in Cambodia?

Born with an energetic power to absorb fear from others, a young woman must find love to balance the fears of her own and fight an ever growing storm of negative energy.

Blinky Bill is a little koala with a big imagination. An adventurer at heart, he dreams of leaving the little town of Green Patch and following in his missing father’s footsteps. When Blinky discovers a mysterious marker that hints at his Dad’s whereabouts, he embarks on a journey that takes him beyond the boundary of Green Patch and into the wild and dangerous Outback.

A charismatic, crazy hothead transforms a family's life when she becomes the nanny of five girls.

GOLDSTONE, the award-winning new feature from Australian auteur Ivan Sen (Mystery Road), is a complex and stylish crime thriller that explores themes of racism, human trafficking, police corruption, corporate malfeasance, and the trampling of indigenous people’s rights. On the trail of a missing person, troubled indigenous detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen, Mystery Road) finds himself in the small mining town of Goldstone, where he is arrested for drunk driving by local cop Josh (Alex Russell, CBS’s “S.W.A.T.”). When Jay’s motel room is blasted with gun fire, it becomes clear that something larger is at play. While struggling to overcome their mutual distrust, Jay and Josh uncover a web of crime and corruption, which leads directly to the town’s cold-blooded Mayor (two-time Oscar nominee Jacki Weaver, Silver Linings Playbook) and its smarmy gold mine director (David Wenham, Lord of the Rings).

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.

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.

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.

After breaking up with his girlfriend, Josh comes to the realization that he is homosexual. With the support of his now ex girlfriend Claire, and his best friend and house mate Tom, Josh must help his mother with her battle with depression and the rest of his family embrace his new found lifestyle.

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.

While on a seemingly routine job, a jaded hit man discovers that he's not the only one with his target in the crosshairs.

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.

In 1983, a naive man is detained by Australian Federal Police with lethal narcotics hidden in his stomach. After being apprehended, ‘The Mule’ makes a desperate choice... to defy his bodily functions and withhold the evidence – literally.

Dean Randall has sponsored a young Chinese orphan Mei Mei for many years, when she arrives in Sydney out of the blue to thank him, their lives are changed forever.

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.

A heartbroken young man decides to walk 4000km up the coast of Western Australia naked, for charity, with the secret goal of making his ex-girlfriend jealous.

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.