Australian films about hope

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.

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.

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.

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

Ellie Linton, a teen from an Australian coastal town, leads her friends on an excursion to a camp deep in the woods, dubbed "Hell." Upon their return, the youths find that their town has been overrun by an enemy army, and their friends and family have been imprisoned. When the hostile invaders become alerted to their presence, Ellie and her friends band together to escape -- and strike back against -- this mysterious enemy.

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.

An art instructor and an English teacher form a rivalry that ends up with a competition at their school in which students decide whether words or pictures are more important.

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.

This 2017 movie follows the original dance academy TV show and tracks where the characters are in their lives now.

Pianist David Helfgott, driven by his father and teachers, has a breakdown. Years later he returns to the piano, to popular if not critical acclaim.

A group of maverick scientists on a remote Australian sheep farm are the globe's only hope for obtaining the epic images of man's first steps on the moon.

A young man aspiring for recognition of his talents battles against his estranged father's sentiment towards him as the father deals with his own demons.

Gettin' Square is about starting over, keeping clean and going straight. Barry Wirth is fresh out of prison and determined to stay on the straight and narrow. But like his mate Johnny 'Spit' Spiteri and reformed gangster turned restaurateur Dabba, he finds out the hard way that there are old scores and a few new ones that'll make getting square a lot harder than he thought.

Accompanied only by her faithful dog and four camels, an Australian satisfies her craving for solitude by embarking on a solo trip across the desert from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean.

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

After a childhood of abuse by his evangelistic father, misfit Oscar Hopkins becomes an Anglican minister and develops a divine obsession with gambling. Lucinda Leplastrier is a rich Australian heiress shopping in London for materials for her newly acquired glass factory back home. Deciding to travel to Australia as a missionary, Oscar meets Lucinda aboard ship, and a mutual obsession blossoms. They make a wager that will alter each of their destinies.

A young social outcast in Australia steals money from her parents to finance a vacation where she hopes to find happiness, and perhaps love.

A gripping female-driven horror film where a young woman faces her darkest fears with seven other unwilling participants in a deadly game. A game that can only have one winner. The film burrows into universal themes of survival, revenge and redemption, and reveals the darkness lurking within us all.

In 1931, three aboriginal girls escape after being plucked from their homes to be trained as domestic staff and set off on a trek across the Outback.

Set in the Little Saigon district outside of Sydney, a woman trying to escape her past becomes embroiled in a drug deal.

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.

A teacher opens a time capsule that has been dug up at his son's elementary school; in it are some chilling predictions -- some that have already occurred and others that are about to -- that lead him to believe his family plays a role in the events that are about to unfold.

Aaron Falk returns to his drought-stricken hometown to attend a tragic funeral. But his return opens a decades-old wound - the unsolved death of a teenage girl.

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.

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.

Jack Irish is thrown into a world of club owners, drug dealers and killers when he is hired by a judge to find a mysterious red book.

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).

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.

Newly arrived to a remote desert town, Catherine and Matthew are tormented by a suspicion when their two teenage children mysteriously vanish.

A small group of town residents have to band together after a devastating ground invasion. As they struggle to survive, they realize they must stay one step ahead of their attackers, and work together for a chance to strike back.

Superman returns to discover his 5-year absence has allowed Lex Luthor to walk free, and that those he was closest to felt abandoned and have moved on. Luthor plots his ultimate revenge that could see millions killed and change the face of the planet forever, as well as ridding himself of the Man of Steel.

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.

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

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.

In the harsh, yet beautiful Australian outback lives a beast, an animal of staggering size, with a ruthless, driving need for blood and destruction. It cares for none, defends its territory with brutal force, and kills with a raw, animalistic savagery unlike any have seen before.

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.

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.

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.

In the winter of 1820, the New England whaling ship Essex was assaulted by something no one could believe: a whale of mammoth size and will, and an almost human sense of vengeance. The real-life maritime disaster would inspire Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.  But that told only half the story.  “Heart of the Sea” reveals the encounter’s harrowing aftermath, as the ship’s surviving crew is pushed to their limits and forced to do the unthinkable to stay alive.  Braving storms, starvation, panic and despair, the men will call into question their deepest beliefs, from the value of their lives to the morality of their trade, as their captain searches for direction on the open sea and his first mate still seeks to bring the great whale down.

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.

A year after the boys crossed dimensions, discovered magic and battled the restoring demon, they are back home in Bremin and are struggling with everyday teenage life. Felix has high hopes for the four heroes. He wants them to push the limits of their magical ability, working as a team to become masters of the arcane. But although he's unwilling to admit it, the boys have grown apart. The boys, once in perfect magical and elemental alignment, are a tangle of rivalry and distrust. On the verge of separating, the Nowhere Boys are drawn together for one last spell when Felix discovers a magically sealed 'Book of Shadows'. Unwittingly this releases a powerful force of chaos, and the gang is reluctantly drawn into a showdown that threatens their world and all they love...

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.

In a universe where human genetic material is the most precious commodity, an impoverished young Earth woman becomes the key to strategic maneuvers and internal strife within a powerful dynasty…

A lighthouse keeper and his wife living off the coast of Western Australia raise a baby they rescue from an adrift rowboat.

After a "white lie" which spirals out of control, a neurotic, naive and musically gifted Muslim cleric's eldest son must follow through with an arranged marriage, except he is madly in love with an Australian born-Lebanese girl.

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.

Kye is a prisoner of war caught between two armies that he doesn't believe in. When offered an opportunity for freedom, Kye sets out on one last rescue mission only to become stranded when his ship crash lands. Kye soon realises that the deadliest creature on the desert moon is himself.

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

In 1919, Australian farmer Joshua Connor travels to Turkey to discover the fate of his three sons, reported missing in action. Holding on to hope, Joshua must travel across the war-torn landscape to find the truth and his own peace.