Sleeping Beauty

Julia Leigh - the award-winning Australian author of The Hunter and Disquiet - was mentored by Jane Campion on her filmmaking debut, an unsettling erotic fairytale selected for Official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Emily Browning is alabaster perfection as Lucy, a university student working numerous self-effacing jobs. She is socially isolated from her housemates and fellow students and spends her limited free time ministering to the peculiar desires of her morbidly depressed best friend Birdmann (Ewen Leslie). Her strong-willed drift towards oblivion is anchored only by a need for money and she signs up with an exclusive lingerie club run by the elegant Clara (Rachael Blake), whose controlling demeanor is both intoxicating and comforting. Like a heroine from a film by Marguerite Duras or Luis Buñuel (directors with whom Leigh shares an austere intellectualism and visual mannerism respectively), Lucy is a sexual and thinking being, neither innocent nor totally complicit. Mysterious and bewitching, her disruptive impulses derive from a mix of boredom and discontentedness and ultimately lead her into a dangerous, heady slumber from which, like the titular princess, she will be awakened.

Australian Premiere

Selected for Official Competition, 2011 Cannes Film Festival

Filmmaker Guests Julia Leigh, Jessica Brentnall, cast and crew

• Director's Bio Julia Leigh is a novelist and filmmaker based in Sydney. She was named co-winner of the 2000 Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year, and ‘one of 21 writers for the 21st century’ by The Observer. Sleeping Beauty is her first film. An adaptation of her novel The Hunter, featuring Willem Dafoe, is currently in production.