Lore

Shortland challenged conventional understandings of Australian national cinema with this European-shot, German-language film, following a teenage girl (Saskia Rosendahl) and her four younger siblings journeying from Bavaria to their grandmother’s house in Hamburg after their Nazi parents are captured in the dying days of World War II.

Adapted from a section of Rachel Seiffert’s celebrated novel The Dark Room and also partly inspired by Elem Klimov's extraordinary Come and See (1985), Lore plays like “a bleak kind of fairy-tale” (Shane Danielsen, SBS) that uses its saturated and grainy Super 16mm cinematography to capture both the pictorial beauty of the countryside as well as moments of necessarily extreme violence that speak to the cataclysm of the final moments of World War II.