DOM-

Australia, 1900, and an afternoon spent languishing under the sun. Young girls in muslin dresses, on a mid-day outing with their teachers, venture between the rocks and are never to be seen again. In 1975, Picnic at Hanging Rock, an adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s eponymous novel, came out on the big screen and shook the Victorian bourgeoise of the time, by means of this depiction of a lunchtime spent in the open air and which promptly descends into an unsolved mystery. Into this vaporous, troubled atmosphere is precisely where Darkness Picnic invites us, setting forth the fiction as a place of sensitivity, and of living together. Extending their research into environmental humanities and queer ecology, Leonardo Delogu and Valerio Sirna seize upon this vision of Australia at the height of the industrial revolution in order to mirror a present in the midst of widespread transformations. At a place in time where conservatism is once again making its presence felt—the control of bodies, corseting of desires, and persistence of the colonial past—the girls from Hanging Rock that vanished into thin air open up a breach, and a possible means of escape.