Don't Tell director Tori Garrett to adapt Peggy Frew's acclaimed novel Hope Farm

But director Tori Garrett, who had a cast headed by Jack Thompson, Rachel Griffiths, Aden Young and Sara West for her dramatisation of a landmark sexual abuse case, is already looking ahead to her next film.

The first-time film director, whose background includes such TV series as Wentworth, Wonderland and Hiding, has bought the film rights to what she calls a "beautiful novel" - Peggy Frew's Stella Prize-winning Hope Farm, about a 13-year-old who moves to a rundown commune in rural Victoria.

"Female protagonists, David versus Goliath against all odds," Garret says."They're the stories I love to tell."

Australian film classics for streaming service

Good news for fans of Australian cinema history. The Australian movie streaming service Ozflix has added a collection of films from the National Film and Sound Archive that go back to the early days of the country's film making.

One is The Hero of the Dardanelles, a reconstructed version of a 1915 film once thought to have been lost, that features a re-creation of the Gallipoli landing shot on Sydney's Tamarama Beach.

Scene from The Hero of the Dardanelles, a 1915 re-creation of the Gallipoli landing. Photo: Ruth Hartmann.

While only two-thirds survives, Raymond Longford and Lottie Lyell's The Woman Suffers (1918), considered Australia's first feminist film, will also be available. So will one of the great comedies of the silent era, The Kid Stakes (1927), the story of Fatty Finn and his gang that features a famous goat race finale; and Ken G. Hall's Smithy (1946), a biopic of aviator Charles Kingsford Smith that was Bud Tingwell's first film.

Teplitzky is back with new film and plans for a Gettin' Square sequel

Having shot the war dramas The Railway Man and the upcoming Churchill, director Jonathan Teplitzky??? is preparing to shoot a real change of pace on the Gold Coast.

He is teaming up with two former collaborators, Gettin' Square writer Chris Nyst??? and The Railway Man producer Chris Brown, for the crime comedy Mr Cranky.

David Wenham as "Spit" in the 2003 crime caper Gettin' Square.

It centres on an underworld debt collector who, with his stripper ex-girlfriend's precocious seven-year-old daughter, has to stave off bikies, Lebanese hit men, a drug-addicted circus clown and his New Age Laughing Circle therapist to become a better man.

Teplitzky tells Short Cuts he is also looking at a sequel to Gettin' Square, the 2003 crime caper that memorably starred David Wenham as drug-addled Johnny 'Spit' Spiteri.

Churchill, starring Brian Cox as the British PM, opens on June 8.

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