1971 • Australia • Directed by Ted Kotcheff

Have a drink, mate? Have a fight, mate? Have a taste of dust and sweat, mate? There’s nothing else out here.

Raw and brutal in its depiction of Outback country drinking culture in the 1970s, Wake in Fright is an uncompromising landmark of Australian cinema from director Ted Kotcheff (First Blood).

John Grant (Gary Bond, Zulu), a bored schoolteacher working in the remote outback, stops overnight in the frontier mining town of Bundanyabba on his way back to Sydney for the Christmas holidays. After he loses all his savings in a bad gambling bet, Grant finds himself marooned and swept up in the vortex of a succession of hard-drinking, hard-living and crude men led by Doc (Donald Pleasance, Halloween), who threaten to make him just as crazy, drunk, and violent as they are.

Ignored upon release, Wake in Fright has now been acclaimed as one of Australia’s most legendary, unique and horrifying contributions to cinema history by the likes of Martin Scorsese and Nick Cave, and is presented here in a new restoration.