A young man grows dissatisfied with his comfortable upper-class life. Against strenuous family objections, he and a friend give up everything to join a band of wandering mystics. In a search for meaning and enlightenment, they spend years in meditation and mortification of the flesh. Eventually, when his friend leaves him to become a follower of a guru, our hero decides the mystic's life does not have the answers he seeks. He rejoins the busy world, eventually becoming a successful merchant, but satisfaction eludes him there too. He ends up as an ordinary boatman, ferrying passengers across a river. In this simple, honest life he finally finds the meaning and joy that has always eluded him.

Siddhartha is leisurely paced-even slow, but the awesome beauty of the cinematography and the fascination of the story maintained my interest throughout.

Adapted from the novel by Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha is a wonderful evocation of the archetypal quest for spiritual knowledge.

If you've ever seen Walkabout , late at night on the telly, the scene you'll remember is of the burning black veedub out in the desert, and the suddenness with which it occurs. Strong and striking visuals are the strength of Walkabout, and the hallmark of English cameraman and first-time director Nicolas Roeg.

From a stark city, a father takes his teenage daughter and six year old son to the edge of the desert in the aforementioned black beetle. Left to fend for themselves, the two children-still in school uniforms-wander the desert until befriended by an aboriginal boy on walkabout. The white boy (John, Roeg's son) soon trusts and communicates with the aboriginal (Gulpilil), but the hesitancy of the girl (Agutter), stems from the undercurrent of sexual desire that develops between the two and becomes the focus of the film.

Indeed, posters of Walkabout's 1971 release proclaim 'the Aborigine and the girl-30,000 years apart ... together', above a photo of Agutter floating naked in a rockpool and Gulpilil silhouetted against the sky. Lovers of nudity in film will note that this re-release director's cut print has restored Agutter's pubic hair, after it was trimmed by the censors back in '71 (gosh).

Walkabout is a film whose significance has grown since its initial release. It's arguably not a film that would have been made by Australians back then, but viewed now, we can appreciate what an outsider could see 30 years ago.