Elizabeth Drake

Movies

Baxter and Me
Original Music Composer
In this charming documentary, director Gillian Leahy combines her two great passions: dogs and film. She openly reveals her life story through a canine prism – lovers may come and go, but there are always the dogs. Leahy also weaves in her filmmaking career, starting out at the Women's Film Workshop in 1970s Sydney and the newly formed AFTRS. Dogs have carried her through childhood illness and heartbreak; in return she lavishes care, and frets over their waywardness. Today, she shares her life with a big brown Labrador called Baxter. There are echoes of Leahy's award-winning My Life Without Steve, a study in love and loss, in this meditative and romantic film.
Looking for Grace
Original Music Composer
When rebellious 16-year-old Grace takes off, her exasperated mum and dad enlist the help of a close-to-retirement detective, and begin the long drive from Perth out to the West Australian wheatbelt to try to find her. On the journey, the two must confront the realities of their changing relationship to one another, and to their daughter…
The Silences
Original Music Composer
New Zealand-born Margot Nash scrutinises the memories and mementoes of her childhood to understand the unhappiness of her parents, and the corrosive instability of the household from which she fled as a young woman in the early 70s.
Japanese Story
Original Music Composer
Sandy, a geologist, finds herself stuck on a field trip to the Pilbara desert with a Japanese man she finds inscrutable, annoying and decidedly arrogant. Hiromitsu's view of her is not much better. Things go from bad to worse when they become stranded in one of the most remote regions on Earth.
Road to Nhill
Original Music Composer
Four women bowlers on their way home to Pyramid Hill (population 550) from a tournament roll their car on a deserted road in rural Victoria. They are coping fairly well until the local men and emergency services start trying to help.
Breathing Under Water
Original Music Composer
BREATHING UNDER WATER is the story of a woman's journey into an imaginary underworld city. The birth of her daughter into an increasingly perilous world has unsettled everything in Beatrice's (Anne Louise Lambert) life. Her growing unease prompts Beatrice to undertake a journey - an investigation into human nature, a confrontation with the fears of our time, and a search for clues that will ultimately give her an answer to the central riddle of the film: why has humankind set the stage for its own extinction? The director’s preoccupation with humankind’s tendency to self-destruct was one factor that lead to the creation of this complex film.
Shadow Panic
Music
Three women appear connected in this short experimental drama about internal and external states of emergency, about personal and collective shadows, about resistance and spirit.
Kemira: Diary of a Strike
Original Music Composer
Weeks before the closure of a Wollongong coal mine, a group of 31 miners occupied the pit and established themselves 5 kilometres underground. The strike, which caught the imagination of the whole country, was documented from the inside by documentarian Tom Zubrycki.
For Love or Money
Original Music Composer
Using almost totally historical material, For Love or Money encompasses the role of Australian women in both paid and unpaid work, over a 200 year period.