Speed Cinema Screenings: Picnic at Hanging Rock 4/5/25 3PM

“The film’s mystery still shimmers.”—Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian 

This sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath put director Peter Weir on the map and helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema. Based on an acclaimed 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock is set at the turn of the twentieth century and concerns a small group of students from an all- female college who vanish, along with a chaperone, while on a St. Valentine’s Day outing.  

Less a mystery than a journey into the mystic, as well as an inquiry into issues of class and sexual repression in Australian society, Weir’s gorgeous, disquieting film is a work of poetic horror whose secrets haunt viewers to this day. 1975, Australia, 4K DCP, 107 minutes. Rated PG