Wake in Fright

Director: Ted Kotcheff

1971 / 109min / 4K DCP

It’s the eve of the Christmas holiday, and polite, young middle-class schoolteacher John Grant (Gary Bond), tied to a position at a tiny township in the outback, is on his way to Sydney to see his girlfriend by way of a stopoff in the grubby mining burg Bundanyabba (“The Yabba” to locals) when he pops into the pub for a drink… Five days of debauchery with local degenerates Donald Pleasence and Chips Rafferty later, the fresh-faced Grant has been replaced by a desperate, unshaven, beer-and-booze-pickled maniac, acquainted with species of depravity he could scarcely have imagined a week ago, and with the barbaric rites of the bush. A furious fever dream from Canuck director Kotcheff, who knew a thing or two about chronic self-degradation as practiced in far-flung outposts of the British Commonwealth, and one of the greatest of Australian films.

Distributor: AGFA

Part of The Worldwide West