Brake Fluid

In 1930s Australia, Anglican clergyman Anthony Campion and his prim wife, Estella, are asked to visit noted painter Norman Lindsay, whose planned contribution to an international art exhibit is considered blasphemous. While Campion and Lindsay debate, Estella finds herself drawn to the three beautiful models sitting for the painter's current work, freethinking Sheela, sensual Pru and virginal Giddy.

A hapless parole officer is framed for murder by a crooked police chief. To prove his innocence he must entice his former clients away from the law abiding lives they are now living to recover the evidence that will save him.

Molly McKay is a profoundly autistic twenty-something woman who has lived in an institution from a young age following her parents' death in a car accident. When the institution must close due to budget cuts, Molly is left in the care of her neurotypical, older brother, Buck McKay, an advertising executive and perennial bachelor. Buck forces her to undergo an experimental medical treatment, with unexpectedly drastic results.

A group of Australian SAS regiment soldiers are deployed to Vietnam around 1967/8 and encounter the realities of war, from the numbing boredom of camp life and long range patrols, raids and ambushes where nothing happens, to the the terror of enduring mortar barrages from an unseen enemy. Men die and are crippled in combat by firefights and booby traps, soldiers kill and capture the enemy, gather intelligence and retake ground only to cede it again whilst battling against the bureaucracy and obstinacy of the conventional military hierarchy. In the end they return to civilization, forever changed by their experiences but glad to return to the life they once knew.

As Australian cinema broke through to international audiences in the 1970s through respected art house films like Peter Weir's "Picnic At Hanging Rock," a new underground of low-budget exploitation filmmakers were turning out considerably less highbrow fare. Documentary filmmaker Mark Hartley explores this unbridled era of sex and violence, complete with clips from some of the scene's most outrageous flicks and interviews with the renegade filmmakers themselves.

A shy young man is hired by an ad agency to conduct a survey on sex in Australia. The somewhat clueless young man investigates homosexuality, transvestites, prostitution, and strip clubs along with every other variant on the "norm". While doing his interviews he meets celebrities, self proclaimed sex experts, prostitutes, female impersonators, pop stars, actors, and legislators as well as self appointed morals guardians.

Alvin is your average guy, except for the fact women find him irresistible and chase him everywhere. He tries to avoid them and get psychiatric help but gets used by the psychiatrists as a gigolo to treat other patients instead.

Mick and Kev – bored, unemployed and aimless in the western suburbs of Sydney – decide to rob a bank, more or less for the fun of it.

A classic Australian underground comedy in which a group of people fight over how to make the truly collective/revolutionary/existential movie. Original intentions get sidetracked but all attempts to set things straight result in yet another, but strangely similar, script. Cast includes: John Flaus, Peggy Cole.

When the sinister Sith unveil a thousand-year-old plot to rule the galaxy, the Republic crumbles and from its ashes rises the evil Galactic Empire. Jedi hero Anakin Skywalker must choose a side.

Gilda Bessé shares her Paris apartment with an Irish schoolteacher, Guy Malyon, and Mia, a refugee from Spain. As the world drifts toward war, Gilda defiantly pursues her hedonistic lifestyle and her burgeoning career as a photographer. But Guy and Mia feel impelled to join the fight against fascism, and the three friends are separated.

Ming Wang is an impoverished Chinese prodigy who flees Communist China to become a pioneering eye surgeon in America. When tasked with restoring the sight of an orphan in India, who was blinded by her stepmother, Wang must confront the trauma of living through the violent uprising in his youth, the Cultural Revolution.

Tale of a 15-year-old Australian girl who went missing.

In the affluent, gated community of Camelot Gardens, bored wives indiscriminately sleep around while their unwitting husbands try desperately to climb the social ladder. Trent, a 21-year-old outsider who mows the neighborhood lawns, quietly observes the infidelities and hypocrisies of this overly privileged society. When Devon, a 10-year-old daughter from one family, forges a friendship with Trent, things suddenly get very complicated.

The Journey of August King is a multi-dimensional drama about a North Carolina farmer in 1815. August King, a widower, is on his way home as he does every year after selling his produce and purchasing the stock and goods he will need to survive the winter. On his journey, he comes upon a run-away slave, a young woman about 19 and August King must decide to violate the law and help this slave to freedom or else leave her to be hunted down and, ultimately, returned to her slave owner.

Set in 1962, a young prepubescent boy in rural Australia watches painfully as his best friend and first love blossoms into womanhood and falls for a thuggish rugby player, changing the lives of everyone involved.

The true story of Irish outlaw Daniel Morgan, who is wanted, dead or alive, in Australia during the 1850s.

The trials and tribulations of the Goddard family after the entry of Australia into the Vietnam War.

In 1970, political journalist Richard lives with Penny but is having an affair with actress Dee. The two woman meet and become friends.

Businessman Gerald Barker is invited to join a mysterious super corporation known as The Firm. His work in the organisation turns out to be of a unique and somewhat disturbing nature. But Gerald finds no comfort with his wife Melissa and friend Barry - his relationships with both collapse. In a surreal and strange fashion, Gerald eventually comes to understand what The Firm is about. Made on a tiny budget of $15,000 the film is a mix of naturalism and stylisation which the filmmaker hoped would work on 'a simple, surrealistic level'.

Four unsuspecting victims find themselves beyond "The Twilight Zone" in a twisted and altered reality: an airline passenger thinks he's lost his identity... a bored housewife thinks she's found romance... a conman thinks he's made his mark... and a hired killer thinks she's ready to retire. Unfortunately for all of them, they soon discover that there's nothing like reality to get in the way of an otherwise perfectly twisted perspective. Things are never quite that simple.

Life inside a late 1960s Carlton student share house plays out across six alternately comedic and melancholy real-time vignettes. When his friend takes a trip, cinephile Al is left alone for the weekend with three female housemates, a situation that only serves to exacerbate his social awkwardness. One of the most distinctive works to emerge from the ‘Carlton ripple’, David Minter’s 1969 slice-of-life comedy carries echoes of Éric Rohmer’s moral tales.

This playful mix of documentary and fiction provides a vibrant record of the Second University Arts Festival held at the University of Melbourne in May 1969, while also providing a fascinating time capsule of late 1960s Bohemian Carlton.