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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

Director

Kitty Green

Cast

Jessica Henwick, Julia Garner, Hugo Weaving, Bree Bain, Toby Wallace

Credits
Country of Origin

Australia/UK

Year

2023

Language

English

Content Warning

Sexual Violence

18+

At The Park

19+

At The Rio

91 min
Drama Women Directors

Book Tickets

Thursday September 28

9:15 pm
Hearing Assistance
Park Theatre
Book Now

Thursday October 05

6:00 pm
Hearing Assistance
The Rio Theatre
Book Now

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 headshot

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)

Showcase

See more films in this series:

Kidnapped

Veteran director Marco Bellocchio (The Traitor) returns with a passionate historical drama about a Jewish child abducted by Pope Pius IX in 1865 on the grounds that he had been secretly baptized. This is a rich, operatic film that resonates strongly.

Park Theatre Vancouver Playhouse

Creature

Art, Music & Photography Drama

In an Arctic research facility, a mysterious creature is found and captured, finding unexpected love with a woman working under the organization. Portrayed through polished ballet, Creature tells the story of unfettered emotion through kinetic movement.

SFU Woodwards International Village 9

The Royal Hotel

Drama Women Directors

In Kitty Green's harrowing follow up to The Assistant, Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) are backpacking across Australia. Running low on funds, they decide tending bar in an Outback mining town could be a lark. This proves a mistake.

Park Theatre The Rio Theatre

Green Border

Drama Human Rights & Social Justice Women Directors

In her seventies Agnieszka Holland has made a ferocious, emotionally charged film about the brutal treatment of refugees arriving over the Polish land border from Belarus. This is a vehement denunciation of resurgent fascism and utterly compelling cinema.

Park Theatre

They Shot the Piano Player

Animation Art, Music & Photography Documentary Human Rights & Social Justice

The fate of a prodigious Brazilian samba pianist murdered in Argentina in 1976 fuels this animated docu-fiction from the team who gave us the Academy Award-nominee Chico & Rita. Jeff Goldblum voices the writer who digs into Francisco Tenório Jr's story.

Vancouver Playhouse Park Theatre

I Am Sirat

Documentary Human Rights & Social Justice LGBTQIA2S+

I Am Sirat is a personal documentary about Sirat, a transwoman in India, who lives a dual life. While supported by a queer network of friends in Delhi, Sirat reverts to the closet at home as she’s forced to maintain a son’s familial and cultural responsibilities.

Vancity Theatre SFU Woodwards

The Teachers' Lounge

Action & Suspense Drama Women Directors

When a grade 6 student is accused of theft, idealistic young math teacher Ms Nowak decides to set up a sting to find the true culprit... with disastrous results. This buzzy Berlin film festival title is an ethics master class.

Park Theatre Vancouver Playhouse SFU Woodwards
Evil Does Not Exist
Evil Does Not Exist film image

Evil Does Not Exist

Drama

After the international success of Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi quietly made this small-scale independent film, a work of simplicity and grace about a rural community and the developers who want to built a "glamping" retreat in the woods.

Park Theatre

The Delinquents

Action & Suspense Comedy Drama

In the heart of Buenos Aires, two bank clerks live a gray, mind-numbingly routine existence—that is, until one of them commits a crime that upends both their lives. Invigorating, precisely composed, and endlessly inventive.

Park Theatre SFU Woodwards

Four Little Adults

Comedy Drama Women Directors

Upon learning of her husband's year long affair, Juulia proposes an open marriage free of secrets. As a polyamory guide becomes their bible, Juulia falls in love with someone new, filling their journey in polyamory with love, compassion, and compromise.

SFU Woodwards Park Theatre

Just the Two of Us

Action & Suspense Drama Women Directors

Beginning as a sunny romance, this film slowly, subtly becomes a defiant feminist drama. When Blanche meets Greg at a seaside party, she’s quickly won over by his confidence and charm, but once they’re married, he reveals a much darker side.

Park Theatre Vancouver Playhouse
Close to You
Close to You film image

Close to You

Drama LGBTQIA2S+

In his first feature film role since 2017, Elliot Page delivers a deeply felt and nuanced performance as a young man reuniting with his family for the first time since his transition, four years earlier.

Park Theatre The Rio Theatre

Tótem

Drama Women Directors

During the chaotic preparations for the birthday of her terminally ill father, a seven-year-old girl finds herself caught amid a complex adult world interspersed with a sense of change. A Buñuelian class study keyed to the interior life of a child.

Park Theatre SFU Woodwards

About Dry Grasses

Award Winners Drama

In a remote village in eastern Turkey, an art teacher enters his fourth and final year at a state-mandated teaching post, but finds himself having to navigate two tricky relationships which force him into existential crisis.

Park Theatre SFU Woodwards

Four Daughters

Award Winners Documentary Experimental & Avant Garde Women Directors

A stimulating and cathartic docu-drama from Academy-Award nominee, Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, about a mother who lost two teenage daughters when they fled to Libya to fight for ISIS.

Park Theatre SFU Woodwards

Il Boemo

Art, Music & Photography Drama

In the baroque courts of 18th Century Venice, the egos of patrons and artists clash in the rise and fall of one of history’s greatest unsung composers, Josef Mysliveček.

Park Theatre SFU Woodwards

How to Have Sex

Award Winners Drama LGBTQIA2S+ Women Directors

Sixteen-year-old Tara and her two best friends arrive to a Greek party town ready to let their hair down. But while Tara is indeed down for some summer fun, her boundaries keep getting trampled on by those closest to her.

Park Theatre The Rio Theatre

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World

Award Winners Comedy Drama

Radu Jude takes two days in the life of a stressed Romanian p.a. and gives us an urgent, pissed off, sourly funny polemic on the state of late capitalism. Exploitation, discrimination and hypocrisy are his targets; dialectics are his dynamite.

SFU Woodwards The Cinematheque

The Monk and the Gun

Comedy Drama

On the eve of the Kingdom of Bhutan’s momentous transition to democracy in 2006, a monk sets off on a mysterious quest for his master, while an American collector arrives in a small town searching for a rare, valuable artefact.

SFU Woodwards Vancouver Playhouse