Picnic at Hanging Rock

An anxious, mysterious film reminiscent of impressionist paintings for lovers of unanswered riddles.

There is a boarding school for young ladies in Australia. Frills, roses, silver mirrors. Good manners, straight backs, boring lessons. Corsets and gloves that cannot be taken off even in the heat. White lace, black stockings, straw hats. Silent Sarah is in love with her most beautiful classmate, Miranda. As punishment for poor grades, Sarah is deprived of a trip to a local attraction—the hanging rock. In nature, the girls have only a few hours to relax from rules, decorum, and even from worn-out gloves. Someone collects a herbarium, someone reads, someone lies on the grass, and several students, including Miranda, set off to explore the rock and disappear without a trace.

This is a rare film in which the mystery is revealed for the sake of the mystery itself, not for its solution. As the director himself said about it, «In my childhood, I loved Sherlock Holmes, but I remember how elementary explanations of complex mysteries disappointed me. I am always more fascinated by the mystery itself than its possible explanations.» And the epigraph from Edgar Allan Poe definitely suits «Picnic»: «What we see and what we are seen as is nothing but a dream and a dream within another dream.»