Movies: Tom Zubrycki

A feature documentary about opera singer Tiriki Onus who finds a 70-year-old silent film believed to be made by his grandfather, Aboriginal leader and filmmaker Bill Onus. As Tiriki travels across the continent and pieces together clues to the film’s...

Dogs of Democracy is an essay-style documentary about the stray dogs of Athens and the people who take care of them. Author and first-time filmmaker Mary Zournazi explores life on the streets through the eyes of the dogs and peoples' experience. Shot...

As notions of civil rights transformed across the world, so was the screen landscape reformed by the ascension of grassroots film movements seeking to challenge the mainstream. Some aspired to push form to its limit; others worked to destabilise what...

The story of 95-year-old Aboriginal elder Laurie Baymarrwangga and her work to maintain the language and cultural traditions of the Yan-nhangu people of Murrungga....

The Carnival captures the intimate moments of the sixth-generation carnival family, the Bells, as they haul their convoy of trucks, rides and workers from Batemans Bay to Darwin and back. Filmed over seven years, their journey includes pandemic shutd...

A journey into the emotional landscape of family, love and loss of two close friends, both Aboriginal, who were adopted by white families and have connected back with their bloodline families....

Following the Sunnyboys’ enigmatic frontman Jeremy Oxley from the band’s origins, breakthrough success and his subsequent 30-year battle with schizophrenia, The Sunnyboy is one man's inspired story of survival and hope. A meditation on a condition o...

‘memory film: a filmmaker’s diary’ is an immersive poetic documentary based on Jeni Thornley’s Super8 archive (1974-2003) filmed during the decades of her political and personal filmmaking, while producing ‘Maidens’, ‘To the Other Shore’, ‘Island Hom...

A film about the Australian government's practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families....

The flying foxes that soar across Sydney each evening face many challenges: impacted by heatwaves, evicted from urban parklands, struggling to survive an ongoing loss of habitat. Bat carers save a handful here and there, and ecologists document their...

A refugee from the Sudanese civil war, Zacharia (one of the ‘Lost Boys' of Sudan) lives in Sydney with his wife and daughter. He desperately wants to do something for his former village, now in the newly created nation of South Sudan. His dream is to...

The dawning of the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin 1973 – an alternative gathering embraced by activists, hippies, and radicals that changed a town (and a generation) forever. The small northern NSW dairy town was the perfect location, surrounded by far...

Heritier Lumumba, formerly known as Harry O'Brien, was in the middle of his best season of AFL when his club president, Eddie McGuire, made a racist on-air comment, suggesting that Sydney Swans player Adam Goodes could be used to promote a King Kong ...

Molly & Mobarak is a 2003 Australian documentary directed by Tom Zubrycki. It follows a Hazara asylum seeker, 22-year-old Mobarak Tahiri, as he falls in love with 25-year-old Molly Rule, and faces possible deportation as his temporary visa nears expi...

Only metres above sea level, the nation of Kiribati is on the front line of climate change. Maria Tiimon, a Kiribati woman living in Sydney, is passionate about her homeland and, despite her shyness, is determined to raise the world's awareness of it...

In his first exploration of the migration experience, Zubrycki poses the question ‘When the fighting stops, how do you make choices about where you want to live?’....

In 1965 during the Vietnam War, students and teachers from the National Conservatory of Music in Hanoi were forced to flee to a small village in the countryside. With the help of villagers they built an entire campus underground where they lived, stu...

For 24 years East Timor's freedom fighter and Nobel Peace Prize winner José Ramos Horta campaigned to secure independence for his country, a Portuguese colony invaded by Indonesia in 1975. The Diplomat takes up Ramos Horta's story in the final dramat...

Cousins Jason and Julian are both 25. And bored. Armed with $100,000, a three-minute film idea, and an award-winning short film director, they decide it's time to change their lives....

The Secret Safari tells the story of one of the most audacious military operations in the armed fight against apartheid in South Africa. A character-driven journey of courage and suspense with reconstructions of events using the original participants...