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Film | Picnic at Hanging Rock 50th Anniversary

24 January 2025

In the Playhouse

Cinema

Australia | 1975 | English | Mystery | PG

Celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2025, Picnic at Hanging Rock is director Peter Weir’s landmark Australian New Wave classic. On Valentine’s Day in 1900, a party of Appleyard College schoolgirls head out on a picnic, and disappear without a trace.

One of the most celebrated films in Australian cinema.

The New York Times

Useful information:

The 50th anniversary of an undisputed Australian classic

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 mastery whose secrets haunt viewers to this day.

Presented by Sydney Opera House

Watch the trailer

Credits

Based on the Novel by Joan Lindsay

Peter Weir
Director

Cliff Green
Script

Bruce Smeaton
Original Music

BEF Film Distribution, McElroy & McElroy, Picnic Productions
Production Company

Hal McElroy, Jim McElroy
Producer

Patricia Lovell
Executive Producer

John A Graves
Executive producer for the South Australian Film Corporation

Cast

Rachel Roberts
as Mrs. Appleyard

Vivean Gray
as Miss McCraw

Helen Morse
as Mademoiselle de Poitiers

Anne Lambert
as Miranda

Karen Robson
as Irma

Jane Vallis
as Marion

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