Name: Picnic at Hanging Rock
Start: 2025-03-08T20:00:00+00:00
Location: Dove Street South, Bristol

Picnic at Hanging Rock
Dir: Peter Weir, 1975, Australia, 115mins, Cert: 12A.
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Fri 7 March // 20:00
Tickets: £5
On Valentine's Day 1900, students from Appleyard College, a girls' private school in Victoria, Australia, embarked on a picnic to nearby Hanging Rock to celebrate the feast of St. Valentine. What happened next is a mystery that has unsettled and intrigued film audiences for almost half a century.
Peter Weir's landmark 'Australian horror romance' perfectly captures the dream-like atmosphere of Joan Lindsay's 1967 novel - allegedly a true story, Lindsay later claimed the narrative appeared to her fully formed in a dream. The unsolved mystery at the centre of the story frustrated film distributors, but when the film was released in America it was a surprise hit, becoming the vanguard of the so-called Australian New Wave.
The film's combination of lush visual aesthetics and ambiguous narrative mystery has exerted an influence on countless filmmakers, and its DNA is evident in the likes of Twin Peaks and the films of Sophia Coppola. A hypnotic audio-visual hallucination, the film has lost none of its power to astonish, and its imagery will haunt you long after you have left the cinema.

Picnic at Hanging Rock was restored in 4K in 2022 by Acid Pictures in collaboration with Second Sight Films at The Grainery laboratory, from the original camera negative preserved by Australian National Film and Sound Archive.
‘An eerie and profound masterpiece’ – The Times