A WIDE ranging programme of Australian cinema, old and new, will be screened at the IFC in Dublin next week as part of the city's week long celebration of Australian culture. The film event officially opens on Tuesday night with the only Irish cinema screening of Richard Franklin's new movie, Hotel Sorrento, the story of a family reunion in a ramshackle house. This screening is dedicated to the memory of one of Australia's best and most prolific actors, the recently deceased John Hargreaves, who features in the film with Caroline Goodall and Joan Plowright.

The openings night will be attended by the Australian director, John Duigan, whose fine coming of age movies, The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting, will be shown later in the week, and by Jeff Browning of the Australian National Film and Sound Archives, who will give a presentation before the screening of Australia's first major silent feature, The Sentimental Bloke (1919), next Friday afternoon.

The fast rising young actor, Russell Crowe, features prominently in the programme - as a young gay man with a liberal father (Jack Thompson) in The Sum of Us (Wednesday), and as a violent racist skinhead in Romper Stomper (Friday), directed by Geoffrey Wright, whose disappointing second feature, Metal Skin, will be shown on Thursday. Look out, too, for Tom Jeffrey's sharp picture of Australians in the Vietnam war, The Odd Angry Shot (Wednesday) with John Hargreaves and John Jarratt, and the closing film on July 7th, Michael Rymer's unflinching drama, Angel Baby, featuring superb performances from John Lynch and Jacqueline McKenzie as mentally disturbed young lovers.