CLASSIC CINEMA
Picnic at Hanging Rock PG
Australia | 1975 115 minutes
DIRECTED BY
Peter Weir
STARRINGRachel Roberts | Anne-Louise Lambert | Dominic Guard
22 April 2026 WEDNESDAY 19:30
AUDITORIUM
Tickets £10.25|£6.25 (under 26)
inclusive of fees
The Australian New Wave saw a resurgence of Australian cinema during the 1970s and 80s, with over 400 films being made during this period. The impetus came from government funding, starting in the late 1960s, which was aimed at preventing the terminal decline of the Australian film industry after World War II.
The film output neither copied the formulaic approach of Hollywood nor the arty approach of Europe: it comprised bold, thoughtful, but strongly narrative movies that found strong appeal in the American market as well as in Australia itself. Peter Weir – born in Sydney in 1944 – was a key player in the Australian New Wave.
Weir started film-making in 1968 and made about a dozen short films (some running 50 minutes or so), before his first feature-length movie was released in 1974. This was The Cars that Ate Paris – Paris, Australia, that is, not Paris, France. A sci-fi comedy horror, written by Weir himself, the film was not successful even at Australian box office, and it took two years to get an American release. Nevertheless, it has since developed into an underground cult classic.
Just one year later, the same production company released Weir’s second feature, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) – a period costume drama adapted from the 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay. How different this was: beautiful cinematography and a strong sense of place centred around the mysterious rock that tempts the schoolgirls, on their picnic, to explore its deepest recesses and secrets – some of them never to return. The fact of the mysterious disappearances being unresolved worried some American distributors, but on release in America the film was both a critical and commercial success, as it was also in Australia and internationally.
Peter Weir went on to direct several very well-known films, some of the later ones for American studios. These include:
Gallipoli (1981)
The Year of Living Dangerously (1982)
Witness (1985)
Dead Poets Society (1989)
Green Card (1990)
The Truman Show (1998)
Picnic at Hanging Rock deserves the big-screen treatment, and that’s what it gets at The Eclectic Cinema, in the Auditorium of Cheltenham Playhouse. Don’t miss the opportunity to see what has been voted the best Australian film of all time!
Booking opens soon