Richard Morecroft

Socially awkward Muriel Heslop wants nothing more than to get married. Unfortunately, due to her oppressive politician father, Muriel has never even been on a date. Ostracized by her more socially adept friends, Muriel runs into fellow outcast Rhonda Epinstalk, and the two move from their small Australian town to the big city of Sydney, where Muriel changes her name and begins the arduous task of redesigning her life to match her fantasies.

Plagued with grief over the murder of her daughter, Valerie Somers suspects that her husband John is cheating on her. When Valerie disappears, Detective Leon Zat attempts to solve the mystery of her absence. A complex web of love, sex and deceit emerges -- drawing in four related couples whose various partners are distrustful and suspicious about each other's involvement.

In Australia, four teenagers in a Sydney theater are astounded to hear the news that a nuclear war has broken out in Eastern Europe. They try to figure out the best way they can survive the coming conflagration.

When shipwrecked sailors first encountered wombats, they did what they had to do to survive - they ate them! More than 200 hundred years later, the wombat still suffers at our hands, blamed for damaging fences and fouling pastures, this film examines the myths and realities of wombat life, above and below the ground, as scientists begin to understand these intrepid and resourceful Bulldozers of the Bush.

A depressed wife and mother whose reality is starting to fracture into fantasy, drives her children to the beach. On the return journey she stops at a service station to fill up with petrol. Four mechanics eye her off and, as one of them walks towards her car, a full-blown erotic fantasy develops.

In this Australian drama, a department store collapses, trapping an old man (Barry Jenkins) and a young boy (Rowan Whitt) underneath. In hopes of keeping the child calm, the man tells him a series of folk tales which teach a moral lesson while they entertain. Somewhere In The Darkness received its world premier at the 1999 Slamdance Film Festival in the United States; it was later screened at Australia's Sydney Film Festival the same year. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi