Death in Brunswick

Viewer Advice: Contains occasional coarse language and depictions of violence.

Featuring a hapless Sam Neill and one of the most memorable scenes in local screen history, Death in Brunswick – screening from a brand-new restoration DCP at MIFF 70 – is a jet-black highlight of Australian comedy filmmaking.

Needing money and some direction in life – and to get his overbearing, somewhat racist mum off his case – thirtysomething loser Carl takes a job as a chef in a definitely not up-to-code pub, where he promptly falls head over heels for the barmaid Sophie. But when Carl finds himself implicated in the death of a kitchenhand, he inadvertently ignites already-simmering tensions between the local Greek and Turkish communities that threaten his new love, and new life.

Director John Ruane’s 1990 debut feature epitomises the giddy, offbeat sense of humour that Australian cinema became known for in the 90s, thanks to the comic stylings of Neill as Carl and the late, great John Clarke as his best mate Dave, as well as Ruane and Boyd Oxlade’s wildly deadpan script (adapting the latter’s novel of the same name). Also featuring a luminous Zoe Carides, and propelled by a jaunty soundtrack courtesy of Split Enz’s Phil Judd, Death in Brunswick is renowned as much for its iconic graveyard scene as it is for its (not always rosy) depiction of working-class multicultural Melbourne – a rarity at the time – and has since gained cult status.

“A pitch-perfect black comedy … It feels rather like a rite of passage: put simply, you do not properly know Brunswick until you have seen the film.” – Fiction Machine