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Restrospective - Bill Bennett

Bill Bennett is regarded as one of Australia's most experienced and respected filmmakers. In a career spanning nearly thirty years, his films have been nominated for more than forty Australian Film Institute Awards, winning twelve. Bill Bennett has won AFI Awards for Best Picture and Best Director.

Bill joined the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1972 as a journalist, and over the next ten years worked on THIS DAY TONIGHT, FOUR CORNERS and A BIG COUNTRY as a reporter, producer and director. In 1978 he won a Logie for Television Reporter of the Year, and shortly after he began working independently as a documentary filmmaker. In 1983 he won the Sydney Film Festival Award for Best Documentary for SHIPWRECKED, about a bungled shipwreck rescue. In 1985 he made his first feature film, A STREET TO DIE. The film won the Crystal Globe for Best Picture at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. His second film, BACKLASH was invited into Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival, and was also invited to the New York Museum of Modern Art's New Directors Festival. It won the Critics Award at the Taormina Film Festival and the Special Jury Prize at Cognac.

Bill Bennett Retrospective

A Street to Die (1985)

An Australian who has fought in Vietnam blames Agent Orange for his cancer, and sues for compensation.

   

Backlash (1987)

Two policemen track down and arrest a woman who has been accused of murder, and begin the trek back across the desert with her.

   

Malpractice (1989)

This docu-drama highlights the complexities of compensation through the legal system for medical malpractice. For when the mother attempts to investigate the hospital procedure of using forceps to deliver her now retarded child, her husband frowns upon this and would rather ignore the whole thing.

   

Mortgage (1989)

One disaster after another is all that the newly married Dave and Tina Dodd reap from their investment in a home to be built in a development outside of Sydney. The builder has almost gone bankrupt, largely due to his hiring incompetent job foremen who can't follow a blueprint. The far from wealthy couple gradually twigs to the disastrous progress of their increasingly expensive dream home, and the strain on their marriage becomes acute as they discuss their options with their lawyers.

   

Spider & Rose (1994)

Spider and Rose are on the road to Coonabarabran. It's Spider's last day working as an ambo, and he's in a hurry. Rose has been in a car crash and would prefer they take their time. Along the way the two get to know each other and have some adventures neither one had planned.

   

Tempted (2001)

A deadly thriller set in New Orleans, about a wealthy businessman, Charlie Le Blanc, who discovers that he only has a short time to live. As he prepares to will his fortune to his beautiful, adoring young wife, Lilly, he begins to wonder if she really deserves it. In order to test her loyalty, he befriends a handsome young man, Jimmy Mulate, and offers him $40,000 to tempt his wife.

   

Two if by Sea (1996)

Frank O'Brien, a petty thief, and his 7-year-long girlfriend Roz want to put an end to their unsteady lifestyle and just do that with their last job which involves stealing a valuable painting. Frank takes Roz to an island on the coast of New England, where he wants to sell the painting and also hopes that their sagging relationship will get a positive push back up. Not everything goes as planned, as some thugs and the FBI try to recover the painting and Roz gets attracted not only to the landscape

   

Kiss or Kill (1997)

After a robbery scam that goes bad, lovers Nikki and Al take off into the Australian outback, pursued by the police and a malevolent footballer named Zipper Doyle, and meet a number of offbeat characters.

   

In a Savage Land (1999)

Two anthropologists married to each other go to an island off of Papua New Guinea for field research in pre-World War II. Eventually the war breaks out and many lives are disrupted and complicated.

   

Nugget (2002)

The Nugget looks at how instant wealth suddenly changes the lives of three working class men - not necessarily for the better, but always with hilarious consequences.