AustLit

'A chronicle of the platonic love affair between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne in early nineteenth century England.'

Source: Australian Screen.

'Under investigation for a fatal shooting, Detective Richard Treloar is transferred to a desk job at the Police Museum. While preparing a photographic exhibition, he becomes obsessed by an archival image of a beautiful murder victim. Consumed by this 30-year-old murder mystery and his own upcoming psychological assessment, Richard's life begins to unravel. When one of his leads turns up dead, his "cold case" is officially re-opened. And he's the prime suspect.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 5/4/2013)

'A woman disappears. Four marriages are drawn into a tangled web of love, deceit, sex and death. Not all of them survive. LANTANA is a psychological thriller about love. It's about the mistakes we make, the consequences we suffer, and the attempts we make to fix things up.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 4/12/2013)

In Sunray, a backwater town on the Murray River, there's little to do but fish or listen to the radio. Two sisters, twenty-year-old Dimity (who works in a Chinese restaurant with few patrons) and perky older sister Vicki-Ann (a hairdresser) have little in their lives to give them an interest, until the local radio station's manager moves in next door. Newly arrived from Brisbane, Ken Sherry is in his mid-40s, self centred, and three-times divorced, but the sisters develop a fierce and competitive crush on him. First Dimity then Vicki-Ann spend the night with their neighbour, one concluding he's her boyfriend and the other considering him her fiancé. That's when Ken's troubles really begin.

Leonard sublets his house to Phil and Jessica, a young couple who spend most nights surrendering to the abandonment of love-making. Leonard and Phil are seemingly unalike, but each has a deep need to dominate and control their relationships with women. When Jessica becomes pregnant and Leonard meets a woman with an unknown past, both men find themselves wanting to exert their power in a way that is no longer appropriate.

Four old friends, now in their late thirties, meet for a school reunion, where the nostalgic environment forces them to admit that the schooling that prepared them for 'real life' also made it impossible for them to share their deepest emotions with those closest to them.

The Fisherman's Wake is a deeply personal account of a man's ambivalent relationship with his father, as seen in the context of his own childhood and his new role as a parent. The son returns to his childhood home to bury the man who taught him not only about courage and love but also to hate and experience fear.

The captain of rugby-union team the Dirty Reds grapples with defeat as his son watches on. Despite new training methods from motivation camps to yoga, the club has posted ninety-seven consecutive losses. For a man supposedly in charge, does losing mean emasculation, or can there be leadership where it seems there may never be victories? What makes and unmakes a hero? How and why do ordinary men seek dignity and power through team sport?

Following the death of his mother, Tom, a fourteen-year-old Chinese boy, returns to school. Seeking normalcy, he is disturbed by recurring dreams of his mother. Ultimately, he is forced to deal with his denial of both anger and grief. The story explores the complex relationship between a boy and his mother. It is about the resentment he feels towards his mother's dependency and the longing he feels for his mother's protective embrace.

Six male writers were each commissioned to write about something that they knew to be absolutely truthful and heartfelt, to lay their emotions bare: an insight into what it means to be a man in the 1990s.

Hughie, a writer in his late forties, is married with three children and living in the country. Through an uncontrollable desire to step outside himself, to recapture the naturalness of feeling of his childhood, and to seek renewal, Hughie leaves his family for the outback. What began as a tentative adventure has the power to change him in ways that are unforeseen, profound, and ultimately irrevocable.

'Ada, her nine-year-old daughter, and her piano, arrive to an arranged marriage in the remote bush of 19th century New Zealand. Of all her belongings, her husband refuses to transport the piano and it is left behind on the beach. Unable to bear its certain destruction, Ada strikes a bargain with an illiterate neighbour. She may earn her piano back if she allows him to do certain things while she plays: one black key for every lesson. The arrangement draws all three deeper and deeper into a complex emotional, sexual bond, remarkable for its naive passion and frightening disregard for limits.'

Source: Screen Australia.

Beth, a successful writer of great energy and humour, lives with her French husband, her daughter by a first marriage, and a lodger, in her inner-city home known as Chez Nous. Everyone gets along, despite some occasional tension, until Beth's much younger sister returns from overseas.