#1. Little Fish (2005)

Storyline: Four years clean, video store manager Tracy (Cate Blanchett) lives quietly, avoiding anything that might trigger a heroin relapse. Her ex-boyfriend Jonny (Dustin Nguyen) returns, claiming he is now a drug-free banker, and the two begin seeing each other again. Tracy looks after Lionel (Hugo Weaving), the man who introduced her to the drug. But, Lionel is thrown into a panic when his dealer, Brad (Sam Neill), suddenly retires. Lionel begs Tracy to help him score, testing her shaky sobriety.

Plot Keywords: drug addict, ex-boyfriend, brother, drug dealer, single mother, bleak, brutal ...

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#2. Finding Nemo (2003)

Storyline: A clown fish named Marlin lives in the Great Barrier Reef and loses his son, Nemo, after he ventures into the open sea, despite his father's constant warnings about many of the ocean's dangers. Nemo is abducted by a boat and netted up and sent to a dentist's office in Sydney. While Marlin ventures off to try to retrieve Nemo, Marlin meets a fish named Dory, a blue tang suffering from short-term memory loss. The companions travel a great distance, encountering various dangerous sea creatures such as sharks, anglerfish and jellyfish, in order to rescue Nemo from the dentist's office, which is situated by Sydney Harbour. While the two are searching the ocean far and wide, Nemo and the other sea animals in the dentist's fish tank plot a way to return to the sea to live their lives free again.

Plot Keywords: fish, bird, turtle, shark, dentist, witty, charming ...

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#3. Walkabout (1971)

Storyline: A privileged British family consisting of a mother, a geologist father and an adolescent daughter and son, live in Sydney, Australia. Out of circumstance, the siblings, not knowing exactly where they are, get stranded in the Outback by themselves while on a picnic. They only have with them the clothes on their backs - their school uniforms - some meagre rations of nonperishable food, a battery-powered transistor radio, the son's satchel primarily containing his toys, and a small piece of cloth they used as their picnic drop-cloth. While they walk through the Outback, sometimes looking as though near death, they come across an Australian boy who is on his walkabout, a rite of passage into manhood where he spends months on end on his own living off the land. Their largest problem is not being able to verbally communicate. The boy does help them to survive, but doesn't understand their need to return to civilization, which may or may not happen based on what the Australian boy ends up ...

Plot Keywords: geologist, teen girl, little boy, aborigine, father, dreamy, gripping ...

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#4. Candy (2006)

Storyline: This story is a narration from an Australian man who falls in love with two kinds of Candy: a woman of the same name and heroin. The narrator changes from a smart-aleck to someone trying to find a vein to inject, while Candy changes from an actress, call girl, streetwalker, and then a madwoman. Starting in Sydney, the two eventually end up in Melbourne to go clean, but they fail. This leads them to turn to finding money and heroin, while other posessions and attachments become unimportant.

Plot Keywords: poet, artist, professor, drug addict, student, dark, sultry ...

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#5. The Home Song Stories (2007)

Storyline: Rose, a Shanhainese songstress singing at nightclubs in HongKong during the 60's, marries an Australian sailor and migrates with her young son and daughter to Melbourne. Her past filled with lost innocence, she begins a cycle of dependence and desperation to create a family for herself and her children, culminating with her affair with Qi, an illegal immigrant from HongKong. Watched through the eyes of her young son, the mother's journey reveals painful truths about the human condition, the love of family and self, and the price we pay for growing up.—Anonymous

Plot Keywords: singer, young boy, sailor, narrator, mother-in-law, sister, dark ...

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#6. Lantana (2001)

Storyline: Trust. A dead body in bracken. A cop cheats on his unhappy wife who, in secret, sees a psychiatrist whose own marriage is corroded by grief: she thinks her husband is having an affair with a gay patient of hers. The cop's lover, Jane, is recently separated, and her neighbors - a couple with children - include a muscular unemployed man. Late one night, the doctor skids off a back road, finds a call box, and tries in vain to reach her husband. She sees headlights and flags down the driver. Later that night, Jane sees her neighbor park his truck and throw something into the lantana in a vacant lot. It's a woman's shoe. Unraveling the mystery lays bare five couples.

Plot Keywords: detective, wife, psychiatrist, neighbor, husband, nurse, emotional ...

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#7. Two Hands (1999)

Storyline: A 19 year old (Heath Ledger) finds himself in debt to a local gangster (Bryan Brown) when some gang loot disappears and sets him on the run from thugs. Meanwhile two street kids start a shopping spree when they find the missing money. Rose Byrne co-stars as a country girl with whom Ledger starts a romance on his trip.—John Sacksteder <jsackste@bellsouth.net>

Plot Keywords: bank robber, country girl, promoter, gangster, teen boy, dark, thrilling ...

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#8. The Last Wave (1978)

Storyline: A Sydney lawyer has more to worry about than higher-than-average rainfall when he is called upon to defend five Aboriginals in court. Determined to break their silence and discover the truth behind the hidden society he suspects lives in his city, the Lawyer is drawn further, and more intimately, into a prophesy that threatens a new Armageddon, wherein all the continent shall drown.—David Carroll <davidc@atom.ansto.gov.au>

Plot Keywords: lawyer, defendant, aborigine, medical examiner, judge, bleak, disturbing ...

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#9. Looking for Alibrandi (2000)

Storyline: Alibrandi ultimately concerns a senior high school girl embracing her Italian heritage, but moving toward the less traditional Australian way of life. A wonderful cast who play their roles superbly. The film plays on several levels. It will make you laugh and cry and ultimately better realise the dramas in life, how we adapt and how cope.

Plot Keywords: teen girl, single mother, grandmother, classmate, teen boy, father, amusing ...

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#10. The Age of Stupid (2009)

Storyline: This ambitious documentary/drama/animation hybrid stars Pete Postlethwaite as an archivist in the devastated world of the future, asking the question: "Why didn't we stop climate change when we still had the chance?" He looks back on footage of real people around the world in the years leading up to 2015 before runaway climate change took place.—Adela Pickles

Plot Keywords: archivist, mountaineer, entrepreneur, protester, scientist, bleak, chilling ...

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#11. Careful, He Might Hear You (1983)

Storyline: His mother dead, PS lives in Sydney with working-class Aunt Lila and Uncle George. When he's six or eight, his posh Aunt Vanessa descends from England. Named a co-guardian by PS's feckless, absent father, she asserts her rights and convinces Lila to have PS live with her weekdays. PS is happy at Lila's, playing with children, running about, speaking up. At Vanessa's, there's a regimen of private school, round vowels, piano and riding lessons, and lonely indoor play with fancy toys. He's miserable and when he objects, she sues for complete custody. Will anyone listen to him? And will he take on Vanessa's challenges to find out who he is and to love someone?—<jhailey@hotmail.com>

Plot Keywords: young boy, aunt, uncle, father, emotional, touching, sydney ...

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#12. Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man (2005)

Storyline: Legendary poet, singer/songwriter and alleged ladies man Leonard Cohen is interviewed in his L.A. home about his extraordinary life and times, interspersed with old footage from his private photo collection and lavish praise plus elaborately performed Cohen cover songs from a motley crew of colleague musicians, amongst whom Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Rufus & Martha Wainwright, Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker and U2's Bono and The Edge. By way of dessert the latter two and their band mates even get to back up the man for a special performance of his own.—Swie Tio <sweet_t_prod@hotmail.com>

Plot Keywords: musician, bono, singer, fascinating, spirited, sydney, opera house ...

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#13. Ladies in Black (2018)

Storyline: Ladies in Black is set in Sydney in the summer of 1959, against the backdrop of Australia's cultural awakening, breakdown of class structures, and liberation of women. It tells the coming-of-age story of suburban schoolgirl Lisa, who while waiting for her final high school exam results with dreams of going to the University of Sydney, takes a summer job at a large department store. Here she works side-by-side with a group of saleswomen who open her eyes to a world beyond her sheltered existence, and foster her metamorphosis.

Plot Keywords: schoolgirl, store clerk, woman, father, mother, amusing, charming ...

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#15. Hearts and Bones (2019)

Storyline: In Ben Lawrence's beautifully acted debut feature, a war photographer Hugo Weaving and a refugee Andrew Luri discover a photograph that threatens to destroy them both. Daniel Fisher Weaving returns home, and despite his partner's protests, prepares for his next dangerous overseas assignment. At the same time, he is preparing for an upcoming retrospective exhibition of his work from the world's war zones. South Sudanese refugee, Sebastian Aman Luri has built a life in Australia, living happily with his wife and young child. When he learns that Daniel's exhibition may display photographs of a massacre in Sebastian's village 15 years earlier, he finds Daniel and appeals to him to exclude those photographs. An unlikely friendship develops between the two men, but it is severely tested when Daniel makes a shocking discovery. Hearts and Bones centres around the relationship of these two men, from very different backgrounds, who bond over their shared trauma. Andrew Luri, who has never acted before and was driving a garbage truck when he auditioned for the role, and Hugo Weaving both brilliantly convey the intricate relationship between the men. With these two powerful performances at its centre, Ben Lawrence has made an intelligent, morally complex and deeply moving film.

Plot Keywords: war correspondent, photographer, refugee, bleak, brooding, dark, emotional ...

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