James Vaughan

Friends and Strangers follows two middle class wanderers in a dryly comic exploration of inner Sydney.

Josie leads a life of passive mundane displeasure before his psychic ills deform him and sees him roaming the rainforest hinterlands of Queensland.

An embittered journalist returns home to Hobart after losing his Melbourne magazine job. With nothing to do except think about his next move, he lands on the idea of writing a book about Tasmanian upper-order batsmen, and in particular the great man himself: David Boon. But soon he’s discovering there’s a lot more to his homeland than he once thought, and that everything he’s been searching for could be closer than he imagined.

Hannah walks through the city, observing people and objects, searching for something, looking at delicious pastries. She is on her way to an appointment with a tarot reader and inside and house space unfolds like the walls of a dream, only to reveal a pair of rummaging thieves. Alone, Hannah is entering a mystery and the clues are sparse and uncertain. She floats like a jellyfish, but perhaps there is no such thing.

A captain and his first mate sail north towards the equator.

Emily longs for an expensive, exquisite silk dress. It’s silly to spend so much money on things, but what is life without plain ordinary pleasures?

Two brothers kill time in a series of ambiguous vignettes that create a mood both playful and unnerving, taking us through the looking glass of middle-class Australia.

Our hero begins her journey through an unsettling and painterly world. She drives down a highway, arrives at an abandoned house, travels through a seemingly endless corridor of broken-hearted lovers, praises love out of a window, and finds furtive romance in a garden. Familiar domestic spaces are rendered uncanny as she muses on love and its power to intoxicate the world around us. This moody vision is torn apart and laid bare. A frenzied film set is deconstructed and our characters play and revel in the cynical absurdity of this mad human endeavour that simultaneously thrills and depresses us.