Browse the collection
By film title
An alphabetical index of all films, organised across features, documentaries, and shorts. Titles beginning with 'A' or 'The' are listed by the following word.
By year of release
Follow the arc of Australian film history chronologically, from the silent era pioneers through to contemporary cinema.
By denomination
Filter by the religious tradition most prominently represented: Christian, Aboriginal, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Indian, and Nature traditions.
Featured entries — 1900 to 1927
-
1900
Not a feature film but a landmark presentation of thirteen short films, 200 slides, and an elaborate music score — first performed at Melbourne Town Hall on September 13, 1900. Depicting scenes of Christ's birth, the Last Supper, and the deaths of early Christian martyrs, it was the first time biblical imagery had come to life for an Australian audience. A Salvation Army project, it raised funds through "rousing hymns sung by the whole gathering."
-
1914
A meditation on sin, guilt, and the religious hypocrite. Dean Maitland seduces a young woman, kills her father, and allows an innocent friend to serve twenty years in prison for the crime. When the friend returns, aged and broken, and enters Maitland's own church, the sight drives him to confess from the pulpit — "the three darkest blots upon the soul of man… have stained my soul" — before collapsing and dying.
-
1917
An early examination of interfaith marriage in Australia — a Catholic woman in love with a Protestant doctor, a father who refuses consent, and a priest bound by the seal of confession who chooses to confess to a murder he did not commit rather than break that vow. The film's resolution, with the couple marrying behind rather than before the altar, underscored the Church's contested view of mixed marriages.
-
1927
Two clergymen frame this story of a man transported to Van Diemen's Land for a murder he did not commit. Rev. Meekin is "pious without compassion"; Rev. North, who witnessed the real murder, drinks, gambles, lies and lusts. Both are portrayed as religious hypocrites — while the protagonist Rufus Dawes, an ordinary man, emerges as the exemplary good Christian by contrast.
A gap worth filling
"Only one small booklet dedicated specifically to religion in Australian film existed at the time of writing."
This database began as a third-year university project at Griffith University and the Brisbane College of Theology, exploring an area of Australian film history that had received almost no dedicated scholarly attention.
It cannot claim to be a definitive list — think of it as a starting point on a colourful journey through a history of religious interpretation within Australian film.