Andrew Upton

In 1950s New York, a department-store clerk who dreams of a better life falls for an older, married woman.

Four strangers — a flight attendant escaping a suburban cult, an Afghan refugee fleeing persecution, a young Australian father escaping a dead-end job, and a bureaucrat caught up in a national scandal — are stuck in an immigration detention center in the Australian desert. Inspired by true events.

Anna and Ryan have found true love together. It's been proven by a controversial test. There's just one problem: Anna still isn't sure. Then she meets Amir.

As an unpredictable, sweeping pandemic causes people to develop sudden amnesia, a man finds himself enrolled in a recovery program designed to help him build a new life. His treatment: performing daily tasks prescribed by his doctors on cassette tape, and capturing those with a Polaroid camera.

Seventeen talented Australian directors from diverse artistic disciplines each create a chapter of the hauntingly beautiful novel by multi award-winning author Tim Winton. The linking and overlapping stories explore the extraordinary turning points in ordinary people’s lives in a stunning portrait of a small coastal community. As characters face second thoughts and regret, relationships irretrievably alter, resolves are made or broken, and lives change direction forever.

Shayda, a young Iranian woman living in Australia, finds refuge in a women’s shelter with her 6-year-old daughter, Mona. Having fled her husband, Hossein, and filed for divorce, Shayda struggles to maintain normalcy for Mona. Buoyed by the approach of Nowruz, she tries to forge a fresh start with new and unfettered freedoms. But when a judge grants Hossein visitation rights, he reenters their life, stoking Shayda’s fear that he’ll attempt to take Mona back to Iran.

Seven (or six - depending on the version) short stories of conquest, desperation and the will to overcome.

In a remote monastery in 1940s Australia, a mission for Aboriginal children is run by a renegade nun, Sister Eileen. A new charge is delivered in the dead of night – a boy who appears to have special powers. When the monastery takes possession of a precious relic, a large carving of Christ on the cross, the new boy encounters Jesus for the first time and is transfixed. However, the boy’s Indigenous spiritual life does not gel with the mission’s Christianity and his mysterious power becomes a threat. Sister Eileen is faced with a choice between the traditions of her faith and the truth embodied in the boy, in this story of spiritual struggle and the cost of survival.

A contemporary psychological thriller in which a young British couple travelling through the Australian outback become involved with a mysterious and charismatic American whose motive for imposing his friendship upon them becomes increasingly suspect and sinister.

An edited version of Rosefeldt's installation work of the same name, Manifesto is an outstanding tribute to various (art) manifestos of the nineteenth and twentieth century, ranging from Communism to Dogme, in connection with thirteen different characters, including a homeless man, a factory worker and a corporate CEO, who are all played by Cate Blanchett. A striking humorous audio-visual experience.

Madame Ranevskaya is a spoiled, aging aristocratic lady who returns from a trip to Paris to face the loss of her magnificent Cherry Orchard estate after a default on the mortgage. In denial, she continues living in the past, deluding herself and her family, while the beautiful cherry trees are being axed down by the re-possessor Lopakhin, her former serf, who has his own agenda.

Follows three United Nations agents whose plane crashes into the Himalayas. Upon being rescued by an advanced civilization secretly living in Tibet, they are granted enhanced intellectual and physical abilities. When the agents return to the outside world, they use their new superhuman abilities to become champions of law, order and justice.

“Queen Bitch and the High Horse” is described as a “cautionary tale,” one that centers on town sweetheart turned corrupt public servant Penny Banks. Banks, an ambitious, larger-than-life woman whose passion for civic duty rivals that of her love for horses, rises the ranks of city hall and turns the town into her personal piggy bank. She goes on to embezzle millions to fund a show horse empire that would take her from the podunk rodeo circuit all the way to the winner’s circle in Kentucky.

Within the world of theatre the rehearsal room is a sacred space -- the private domain where boundaries are pushed, risks taken, mistakes made, vulnerabilities exposed and, at its very best, magic created. It's not a place into which the public is often, if ever, invited. Until now; In The Company of Actors features an ensemble of Australia's finest actors, including Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving, as they prepare to perform the Sydney Theatre Company's production of Hedda Gabler, at the prestigious Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. Opening night is just five weeks away and the pressure is on.

On a quest to prove his competency, an inept sound recordist finds himself entangled in a nautical prophecy on the spectral island of Pincer Point.

Nora and Bing Bing are best friends who scam sugar daddies for a living. When they discover a Hermes Birkin bag they were gifted is a fake, their “boyfriends” and crimes catch up with them and they are sent on a romp through their hometown of Hong Kong.

Rosie returns to her home city on the death of her father, a former policeman. His diaries hint at corruption, and she also receives hints and veiled threats which support her suspicions. Rosie puzzles about who he was, and about her early life and relationship to him.

The romantic myth is exposed for Guy when he is plagued by memories of an old girlfriend on his wedding day.

Julie-Anne comes home from a hard day at the office to discover her mother has locked the cat in the house all day (again) and that she is expected to cook 'bangers' for dinner. Preparing the meal becomes a manifestation of all the repressed tensions in Julie-Anne's work and home life.

An adaptation of Lucia Berlin’s stellar short story collection, examining the lives of women working a wide variety of demanding jobs.