Butterfly Kingdom follows the adventures of a Blue Tiger butterfly named Blue as she embarks on an extraordinary journey of transformation and survival.
Hatching from a tiny egg as a caterpillar Blue undergoes an incredible metamorphosis. Winter arrives and Blue must begin migrating to follow the warmth of the sun, flying hundreds of kilometres north over Australia’s Great Barrier Reef towards Magnetic Island.
This film will explore the tiny world of Butterflies, following them on their extraordinary migratory journey in search of warmth as audiences ponder their cultural significance to human beings.
In the 70s, Australia had an unofficial documentary unit whose job was to reflect the nation on film. For most of the 20th century it made standard government propaganda narrated by English male voices.
But in the early 1970s, something remarkable happened. The government seemingly lost control of its own unit. The films suddenly exploded with fresh perspectives – First Nations Australians, young people, newly arrived migrants and women. To this day, the films have remained in the archive, largely untouched.
In this series we crack open this forgotten cache of Australian archive material, revealing the hidden history of the 70s, a time when the accepted representation of being Australian went from white, anglo and largely male to an image, which for the first time, admitted a more diverse group of voices: female, multicultural, indigenous and queer.
A nine year old boy embarks on an epic solo odyssey on horseback through Depression era Australia, to witness the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in this scripted feature that asks how far one will go in search of a dream.