Wake in Fright

Scanned from the original camera negative, and then colour-corrected and stabilised one shot at a time, this new restoration has undergone months of work to clean all imperfections and distortion. Umbrella’s brand-new restoration of Wake In Fright marks the most recent entry into the muddied and strange history of the fi lm which saw it almost lost forever.

Regarded as one of Australia’s fi nest and most culturally significant films, Wake In Fright first opened the Cannes Film Festival in 1971 and chronicles one man’s hellish experience in a fictional town in the Australian Outback. After a menial theatrical release, the films camera negatives vanished from the face of the earth for over three decades, until editor of the film Anthony Buckley AO finally tracked them down after many false starts. In 2004, all 263 film cans containing the original O- Negative finally arrived on home turf. Fast forward almost two decades and Umbrella Entertainment has cracked open the vault one more time to dust of the prints and ensure this masterpiece of Australian cinema is preserved

Restoration Details:
The original camera negative was scanned in 4K by the National Film and Sound Archive before being sent to our restoration facility to be colour corrected and stabilised one shot at a time. The team then cleaned each shot frame-by-frame removing any imperfections and correcting any distortion. With over 300 shots per reel, this resulted in months of intense restoration work before a feature-length preview was ready. 

Director: Ted Kotcheff
Producer: George Willoughby
Cast: Donald Pleasence, Gary Bond, Chips Rafferty