Cirrus@Austlit

'Two men of opposing viewpoints fall in love with the same woman in this historical saga set in the Australian outback at the turn of the century.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 15/4/2014)

When ex-con Eddie takes a job working on his older brother's isolated farm, all seems well--but not for long. Dead birds fall from the sky, pets attack their owners, and seemingly stable people go suddenly insane. What is happening at Raven's Gate?

According to science-fiction review site io9,

'Despite the relative thinness of its premise, Encounter At Raven's Gate is not all that bad a movie. The performances are solid, the characters more richly textured than you might expect and the cinematography has the lonely, big sky feel of art house Australian films like Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave and John Hillcoat's The Proposition. [...] If this seems like an awfully long way to go for an alien invasion/demon possession movie...it is. Like M. Night Shyamalan's similarly structured (and one might even go so far as to say totally rip-off) film Signs, Encounter At Raven's Gate is at its best when it's not pursuing the alien invasion story. The tension between the characters is so organic that when the inevitable magnetic anomalies, smoke machines and disco lights kick in, they rob the film of its distinctive flavor.'

Source: io9 (http://io9.com/5854464/the-australian-alien-invasion-flick-encounter-at-ravens-gate-is-like-signs-but-with-football-hooligans). (Sighted: 15/6/2012)

A doctor treats an Indigenous Australian patient who admits to having defied a tribal taboo and visited a sacred cave. After the encounter, the doctor begins to experience strange dreams, and finds herself drawn into a 200-year-old mystery.

With the human race nearing extinction and the Earth now controlled by a new race of beast-like creatures, the few surviving humans isolate themselves in the City, an enormous construction with the ability to travel in both time and space. As humanity's situation becomes critical, the City travels back to the twentieth century in a desperate attempt to save humanity once and for all.

Mini-series tracing the 'untold story' of Abel Magwitch, the transported convict who is the source of Pip's 'great expectations' in Charles Dickens's novel.

Dickens left Magwitch's experiences in the New South Wales colony relatively unnarrated, and this mini-series uses that aspect of the novel to interrogate Australia's colonial past. Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, notes the 'formal narrative parallels that exist between the Victorian novel of the nineteenth century and the television mini-series', but adds that

Great Expectations--The Untold Story was an interesting idea but unfortunately the ABC discovered that it has been thought of already by Queensland writer Michael Noonan, who had published a novel along these lines. Ironically Noonan had previously enjoyed good relations with the ABC (his Patchwork Hero, for example, was produced by the ABC in 1981). The copyright dispute was settled and the series went ahead.

Moran also notes that 'Tim Burstall and Antony I Ginnane, senior figures in the co-production company, International Film Management, had done little in television to that point, being associated more (as director and producer respectively) with feature films, specialising in commercially generic potboilers of one kind or another'.

'Danny, a 16-year-old street kid from Brooklyn arrives in South Australia to meet up with his father, Nat, whom he hasn't seen for ten years. Nat, an ex-Vietnam pilot, now faces financial ruin and has agreed to fly a consignment of marijuana down from the north. It is a bad time for Danny to arrive on the scene. The father and son relationship is not going to be a smooth one.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 16/4/2014)