Hanna (Julia Garner) is backpacking across Australia with her best friend Liv (Jessica Henwick). Running low on funds, they decide that a job tending bar in an Outback mining town might be a lark — the job comes with free lodging, after all, and not a little booze. The owner, Billy (Hugo Weaving) does his best to keep the rowdy regulars in order, but then again he’s always drunk himself. Beer culture in a place like this is always going to be a wild ride, but the young women have no idea just how quickly the bottom can drop out of their world. This deeply unsettling film is inspired by a true story — or, more accurately, many true stories. Director and co-writer Kitty Green comes from a documentary background and just as she did with her acclaimed 2019 #MeToo drama The Assistant (also with Julia Garner), Green exactingly grounds the material in the real world. But that’s not to say this cautionary tale is anything less than gripping. Expect a vertiginous decline in Australian tourism.
A masterfully constructed pressure cooker about the perils of being a woman… Few movies have ever so palpably or intricately conveyed the violent pall of male attention.
David Ehrlich, Indiewire
Jessica Henwick, Julia Garner, Hugo Weaving, Bree Bain, Toby Wallace
Australia/UK
2023
Showcase
English
Sexual Violence
At The Park
At The Rio
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits
Executive Producer
Simon Gillis
Producer
Emile Sherman, Liz Watts, Iain Canning, Kath Shelper
Screenwriter
Kitty Green, Oscar Redding
Cinematography
Michael Latham
Editor
Kasra Rassoulzadegan
Production Design
Leah Popple
Original Music
Jed Palmer
Director
Kitty Green
Kitty Green was born in Melbourne. Her works include the documentaries Ukraine is Not a Brothel (2013) and Casting JonBenet (2017), as well as the narrative feature The Assistant (2019).
Filmography: Ukraine is Not a Brothel (2013); Casting JonBenet (2017); The Assistant (2019)
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
Case 137
When a teenage demonstrator is grievously injured by rubber bullets during a frenzied protest in the streets of Paris, an intrepid Internal Affairs investigator must determine whether her fellow officers employed excessive force.
Image: © Fannyde Gouville
News From Home
One part city symphony, one part introspective meditation, one part epistolary text, News from Home is a structuralist masterwork by Belgium’s genius of contemplation, Chantal Akerman.
Living the Land
Huo Meng’s film folds a grand historical reckoning into the story of one rural family in 1990s China. Visually rich and finely detailed in its human portraiture, this is a moving, elegiac work.
Bad Girl
From her journey through high school and college, then out into the wider world, Ramya’s dream of finding the perfect guy is obstructed by societal mores, strict parents, unrequited love and the untrammelled chaos of her own mind, in Varsha Bharath’s naughty and affecting comedy.
The Art of Adventure
The unbelievable adventure story of how painter Robert Bateman and ecologist Bristol Foster drove a Land Rover from Africa to Australia in 1957, developing a love of nature to last a lifetime. An inspirational love letter to the adventure of life itself.