Picnic at Hanging Rock
Director: Peter Weir Run Time: 117 min. Format: DCP Release Year: 1975
Starring: Anne-Louise Lambert, Dominic Guard, Helen Morse, Jacki Weaver, Rachel Roberts
New Restoration
“On St. Valentine’s Day in 1900 a party of schoolgirls set out to picnic at Hanging Rock… Some were never to return.”
This sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath put director Peter Weir on the map and helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema. Based on an acclaimed 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK is set at the turn of the twentieth century and concerns a small group of students from an all-female college who vanish, along with a chaperone, while on a St. Valentine’s Day outing. Less a mystery than a journey into the mystic, as well as an inquiry into issues of class and sexual repression in Australian society, Weir’s gorgeous, disquieting film is a work of poetic horror whose secrets haunt viewers to this day. – Janus Films
“One of the most hauntingly beautiful mysteries ever created on film.” – Peter Stack, San Francisco Chronicle