Get out of the house on the third Wednesday evening of each month and enjoy films on the big screen with us!

The Drill Hall Film Society screens classic films at an affordable price in comfortable tiered seating in our air-conditioned theatre. Grab a delicious snack and beverage from the bar, and be part of our lively film discussions after each show.

Become a Film Society subscriber for just $75 and gain entry to 11 films/year (or $60 if you’re a Drill Hall Theatre Company associate member). Casual guest rates cost $10/film.

Renewals due in July.

Contact Peter on [email protected] for more information or to become a member.

The Drill Hall Film Society is a member of the Australian Film Societies Federation which provides support and information. To find out more visit AFSF.

Wednesday June 17th @ 7pm

Bicycle Thieves is so well-entrenched as an official masterpiece that it is a privilege to visit it again after many years and realise that it is still alive and has strength and freshness. It won the Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars and the Golden Globes in 1949 and the BAFTA for Best Film. Routinely voted one of the greatest films of all time and revered as one of the foundation stones of Italian Neorealism, it is a simple, powerful film about a man who needs a job.

The film was directed by Vittorio De Sica, who believed that everyone could play one role perfectly: themself. It was written by Cesare Zavattini, the writer associated with many of the great European directors of the 1940s through the 1970s. In his journals, Zavattini writes about how he and De Sica visited a brothel to do research for the film – and later the rooms of the Wise Woman, a psychic, who inspires one of the film’s characters. What we gather from these entries is that De Sica and his writer were finding inspiration close to the ground in those days right after the war, when Italy was paralysed by poverty.

Italian Neorealist cinema is often characterised with stories being about the lower class in society, but together with techniques which involve using non-professional actors and filming on location. Bicycle Thieves indeed utilises all of these in order to create the feeling of naturalism running throughout the picture, hence we are also brought much closer to the situation which our lead characters are inhabiting. There’s a sense it almost feels like a documentary filmmaker is moving around watching a specific person go on with his life in such a rough state, and the realistic feeling of the situations which we are watching on the screen forms an impact that becomes so difficult to describe.

Bicycle Thieves is a film that has aged splendidly, for its picture of poverty still rings true within this day and age in many parts of the world.

Date TBC

Giulietta Masina, Fellini’s wife, had her most famous role as Cabiria, the Roman streetwalker who, despite being knocked down by life more than once, never gives up on her dreams of love and happiness. Most of the scenes in the movie were kept in the Broadway Musical adaption renamed Sweet Charity, including the opening scene of being shoved into the drink by a treacherous boyfriend; her fleeting, glamorous encounter with an Italian movie star; a bizarre religious pilgrimage and her seemingly hopeful romance with a nice accountant.

Masina won the best actress award at Cannes, and the film won the Oscar for best foreign picture. Masina deliberately based her Cabiria on the Little Tramp; but while Chaplin’s character inhabited a world of stock villains and happy endings, Cabiria survives at the low end of Rome’s prostitution trade. Afterall she is a working girl, not a sentimentalised one, as in “Sweet Charity,” but a tough cookie who climbs into truck cabs, gets in fights, hides in the bushes during police raids and lives in a tiny shack in an industrial wasteland.

The film is generally considered an evolution of Italian post-war Neorealism. While it uses Neorealist elements like on-location shooting, working-class settings, and a focus on poverty, it bridges that movement with Fellini’s signature subjective style, blending gritty realism with social commentary and a touch of lyricism.