Modern Love

John, Emily and their young son Edward leave the city for what they believe will be a brief foray into the countryside to claim the small shack John has inherited. The family finds itself in a rural setting where nothing is what it seems. John's behaviour becomes increasingly bizarre as he crosses paths with the area’s unusual inhabitants, some of whom he knows from a distant past. As his connections to the area are gradually uncovered, we witness a man with a long lineage of disaster, mishap and rural weirdness. Is this a dream? A nightmare? A rural fantasy? Is this a journey into the gothic heartland of rural Australia? Or is it one man losing his mind? Modern Love won international headlines when it was selected for the Moscow Film Festival last year. It represents a timely contribution to the debate about the relation of Australians to the landscape and the culture of the outback.

Alex Frayne is a Guest of the Festival

I wanted to create a vision of Australia that no-one really sees...craggy coasts and dense clouds and vivid textures of The Southern Land. The place I grew up in. The little ghost towns I knew, where people are shy, secretive and seem a part of the old fixtures and machinery that lies about in these places.

Alex Frayne