Colin Friels
When there is a mysterious disappearance on an outback cattle station, Detective Jay Swan is assigned to investigate. Working with local cop Emma James, Jay’s investigation uncovers a past injustice that threatens the fabric of the whole community.
A part-time country pub singer has a chance meeting with a wealthy city hotelier which triggers a series of events that will change her life forever. Explore the worlds of 'the haves' and 'the have nots' with heart, humour, romance and music.
Who are we? And where do we come from? Australia's greatest Olympian Ian Thorpe, iconic Indigenous actor Ernie Dingo, and TV presenter and Queen of Eurovision Julia Zemiro set off on an epic journey of genetic time travel to find out.
Young Sydney Sailboat explores the waters of Bubble Bath Bay, going on adventures with his nautical friends, including best bud Zip the Water Taxi. They learn about life under the command of Terry the Tugboat as they go on adventures that teach them about friendship, teamwork, resourcefulness, cooperation, respect and problem solving. Other boats that can be found in Bubble Bath Bay include cranky crane Muddles, speedboat Jet and chatterbox ferries Bryan and Toots.
Seventeen talented Australian directors from diverse artistic disciplines each create a chapter of the hauntingly beautiful novel by multi award-winning author Tim Winton. The linking and overlapping stories explore the extraordinary turning points in ordinary people’s lives in a stunning portrait of a small coastal community. As characters face second thoughts and regret, relationships irretrievably alter, resolves are made or broken, and lives change direction forever.
Jack Irish is a man getting his life back together again. A former criminal lawyer whose world imploded, he now spends his days as a part-time investigator, debt collector, apprentice cabinet maker, punter and sometime lover - the complete man really. Jack is an expert in finding those who don't want to be found - dead or alive. He helps out his mates while avoiding the past. That is until the past finds him.
A young aspiring rock guitarist is forced to become the musical director of the local marching band when his father is hit by a bus just four weeks before a major competition.
A woman struggles with her son's illness and her husband's infidelity, but, after a chance encounter with an Irish sailor and his son, her life is turned upside down in a love story that defies explanation and breaks all the rules.
Ellie Linton, a teen from an Australian coastal town, leads her friends on an excursion to a camp deep in the woods, dubbed "Hell." Upon their return, the youths find that their town has been overrun by an enemy army, and their friends and family have been imprisoned. When the hostile invaders become alerted to their presence, Ellie and her friends band together to escape -- and strike back against -- this mysterious enemy.
Geoff Brewster has retreated to the family’s isolated, coastal shack to die in peace. He is also going blind. Geoff spends his days walking on the beach and leaving tape-recorded confessions to his estranged wife, Sally. But Geoff’s solitude is interrupted when his Porsche driving nephew, Josh, turns up and decides to stay. Tension fills the shack as Josh’s strange behaviour sets Geoff on edge and when Sally arrives for her weekly cleaning, the shack is ready to explode. Sally encourages Geoff to audition for an amateur production of Hamlet and Geoff takes to Hamlet like Olivier. But Geoff goes totally blind. The arrival of two strangers bearing the ashes of one of Geoff’s lovers sets Geoff and Josh on a collision course that threatens to destroy the both of them. Blind Company was adapted from Austin Pendleton's stage production Uncle Bob, that was set in New York. Quite the difference in location from Tasmania.
Gangs of Oz is an Australian television documentary series on the Seven Network narrated by actor Colin Friels. The show looks at real stories of Australia's criminal underworld with accounts from criminals, their families and the police who risk their lives to catch them.
McInnes plays a suburban dad who works as a police informant for a federal investigative agency. The character’s background is shrouded in mystery, with intelligence officers seeking to uncover the truth about his past by working with him.
Nearly 20 years ago a young mother was shot during an apparent kidnapping and subsequent police chase. Now after all that time, the man in jail for the murder is about to be paroled. Jack has two missions - to bring the father and his daughter back together and to find out if any justice has been done by the conviction.
Australia's aviation history is a saga of daring feats, can-do attitude, pig-headed visionaries, iron-fisted politicians and warring pilots; of humble beginnings and mega deals.
Bastard Boys is an Australian television miniseries broadcast on the ABC in 2007. It tells the story of the 1998 Australian waterfront dispute. The script, published by Currency Press, won the 2007 Queensland Premier's Literary Award for Best Television Script.
An erotic mystery about power and sex, the entanglement of victim and perpetrator, and a man's struggle to regain his lost self.
A young woman goes missing when her car breaks down one rainy night. Her body is later discovered in a national park and for Detective Jack Kempson's offsider Sam, details of the crime mirror the disappearance of her friend Hannah, who vanished without trace some years ago. In Kempson's pursuit of the truth Sam is forced to face the sordid secrets of her past.
Ten years ago, a baby was killed in a house arson fire after a violent home invasion. The parents used the tragedy as a motivation to help build an evangelical community church but now the mother has comes to Jack for help. Jack agrees to look into the still unsolved crime but in looking for the truth Jack will have to fight the system and his own conscience to uncover a tangled web of lies and deception. In the end, Jack must decide if the truth should prevail over the interests of the innocent.
Jack Barrett is the type of guy no one calls Jack. He works for a group of businessmen known as "The Gentlemen" who operate within the fertile realm of the Sydney Underworld. Standover tactics, prostitution, illegal gambling, creative importation - you name it, "The Gentlemen" are into it. And Barrett enforces it for them. Old school muscle for hire. Now 53 years old, he's tired of having to throw away perfectly good suits because you can't dry-clean the blood off. He needs to get out of Sydney. Out of the game. Which is, of course, easier said than done.
After wearing a wire to catch a dirty colleague selling confiscated drugs, detective Jack Kempson is hated by his colleagues. He also gets 'promoted away' to the basement, where old files get transferred to the national computer database. Thus he comes across fingerprints, now identifiable, in the 30 year old case of Ashley, the kidnapped son of lottery winners. Although he's too late to help him now, he tracks the perpetrators down behind his boss's back.
Jack uncovers a disturbing new plot in the unsolved murder of a loving mother
Gary Kelp (Samuel Johnson) is losing the plot. As he edits a medical journal called The Illustrated Family Doctor, his life and his body seem to be falling apart. A black comedy about coping with the modern world, based on the novel by David Snell.
Jack investigates a gangland execution at a children’s football game twelve years ago.
Uses accounts from family, friends, and acquaintances to tell the story of Natalie Wood and how she started young, acting in the spotlight, making the transition from a childhood actress to serious actress, dating the top names in Hollywood, her life and marriage to her husband, Robert Wagner,and her biggest fear that ended up being the cause of her death
BlackJack is a series of Australian television movies created by Shaun Micallef and Gary McCaffrie, and starring Colin Friels. The movies began airing on Network Ten in 2003 and concluded in 2007. They were shown in the United Kingdom on the BBC and UKTV Drama. After testifying against his former colleagues in a corruption trial Sydney detective Jack Kempson is reassigned to a unit charged with entering the details of old cases into a police database. He unofficially begins to investigate unsolved crimes dating back many years.
Australia, 1958. When a nine year old white girl is found murdered, police are quick to arrest illiterate Aborigine, Max Stuart. Under interrogation Max admits to the killing and signs a statement that will send him to the gallows. With no Court of Appeal established in the country, and with a legal system compromised by intimidation tactics and the stain of institutional racism, the skills of his two gifted but naive defense lawyers are put to the test. Based on a true story.
A lawyer becomes a fisherman from frustration. When his one piece of property, his boat, is struck by lightning and destroyed he is denied insurance money because it was “an act of God”. He re-registers as a lawyer and sues the insurance company and, as God’s representative, The Church.
As America struggled through the Great Depression in the 1930s, a little girl with big dimples and indescribable charm danced her way into the hearts of moviegoers around the world.
Based on the true story of an Australian woman that was murdered in bed next to her husband.
Lewis, a young amateur theater director, is offered a job with a governmental program for the rehabilitation of mentally ill patients in a Sydney institution. His project is overrun by one of the patients who wants to stage the opera Cosi Fan Tutte by Mozart despite the fact that none of the patients are able to sing and none of them speak Italian. A comedy of errors ensues, but one which unifies the patients and their director in unexpected ways.
All Wally Mellish, an ex-convict in 1960s Australia, wants to do is live a quiet life with his girlfriend Beryl. Unfortunately when two police officers come around to disturb this, a misunderstanding quickly becomes out of control, resulting Wally, Beryl and her child being trapped in their house, surrounded by armed police under the impression that Wally is holding everyone hostage. Events quickly spiral into a media circus as, through the siege, Wally - inadvertently - manages to become a symbol for the anti-war movement.
Water Rats is an Australian TV police procedural broadcast on the Nine Network from 1996 to 2001.
Two schizophrenics meet during therapy and fall in love. Unfortunately they are on a road to nowhere...
A garage mechanic out in the middle of the outback gets involved with the girl friend of a jewel smuggler who is on the run.
Morgan Leafy is a secretary to the British High Commissioner to an Africa nation. Leafy is a man that makes himself useful to his boss, the snobbish Arthur Fanshawe, who has no clue about what's going on around him, but who wants to use his secretary to carry on his dirty work, which involves getting one of the most powerful men in the country to do business with his country.The young secretary has an eye for beautiful women around him, especially Hazel, a native beauty, with whom he is having an affair. Things get complicated because Sam Adekunle, a man running for president of the country, wants a favor from Leafy in return after he has accepted the invitation to visit London. The proposition involves swaying a prominent doctor's opposition to a plan that will make Adenkule filthy rich.
Stark is a 1993 British-Australian television miniseries, based on the bestselling novel Stark by comedian Ben Elton. The three-episode series, directed by Nadia Tass, was an international co-production between the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
The Nostradamus Kid is a 1992 Australian feature film written and directed by Bob Ellis. Romantic comedy about the religious and sexual coming of age of a 1960s Seventh-day Adventist boy. Ken Elkin (Noah Taylor) is a "randy young man" who is told that the world is about to end. In a race against time, there's only one goal he wants to accomplish bedding the love of his life, who just happens to be the local pastor's daughter.
Young John Anderson is captivated by jazz musician, Billy Cross when he performs on the remote airstrip of his Western Australian outback hometown after his plane is diverted. Years later, now a family man and making a meagre living tracking dingoes and playing trumpet in a local band, John still dreams of joining Billy on trumpet and makes a pilgrimage to Paris.
A Liberal activist lawyer alienated his daughter Maggie years ago when she discovered his many affairs. Now a conservative corporate lawyer, Maggie agrees to go up against her father in court. To gain promotion, she must defend an auto manufacturer against charges that their explosion-prone station wagons are unsafe. As her mother begs for peace, Maggie takes on her dad in a trial that turns increasingly personal and nasty.
Dr. Peyton Westlake is on the verge of realizing a major breakthrough in synthetic skin when his laboratory is destroyed by gangsters. Having been burned beyond recognition and forever altered by an experimental medical procedure, Westlake becomes known as Darkman, assuming alternate identities in his quest for revenge and a new life with a former love.
This breezy sex comedy follows ex-journalist turned rock promoter Richard Muir (Colin Friel), who is pulled in two different directions by the women in his life -- his vivacious wife, Catherine (Catherine McClements), who wants to have a baby -- and Carla (Helen Mutkins), his ambitious mistress, who wants to have Richard.
A convent teacher spreads a little happiness and makes enough money to support her crippled brother's habit by selling her favours regularly on a cross-country night sleeper. She makes sure she is in control of each encounter until one client reaches her more than she expects.
A schoolteacher (John Waters) becomes obsessed with the idea that his wife (Joy Bell) did not die in a car accident, as everyone else thinks.
A second generation cameraman in Australia finds evidence that his father had filmed a nuclear test that allowed aboriginies to be exposed to and killed by radiation. He begins a search for a secret that if true, his government has already killed people to keep quiet.
Malcolm is a chronically shy mechanical genius, who has just been fired for building his own tram. He gets Frank, who has just been released from jail, to move in to help pay the bills. Malcolm, with Franks help, turns to a life of crime. Malcolm is a 1986 Australian cult film, written by David Parker and directed by Nadia Tass. The film stars Colin Friels as the titular tram enthusiast who becomes involved with petty crime. The film won the 1986 Australian Film Institute Award for Best Film.
Teenage boy from a small village learns that he is in fact the secret twin brother of the current corrupt king of France. The four musketeers ask him to replace the king, but in a way that no one finds out about the switch. Burbank Films Australia animated release.
Steve Lucas is a nineteen year old who is filled with the burning resentment of being forced to live in his brother's shadow. His brother Adam, is burdened by his father's desire for glory, and must win The Coolangatta Gold Tri-Aquathon, It is the greatest endurance test of them all: a marathon involving a 20 kilometer beach run, 6 kilometer swim and a 17 kilometer surf ski from Surfers Paradise along the golden arc of beach to Coolangatta and back to the start. The Coolangatta Gold is a story of human endeavor and endurance against overwhelming odds.
In 1830's England, a young man from a good but troubled family is unjustly convicted of stealing a watch. He's transported to Van Dieman's Land (Tasmania) where he suffers under the enmity of Lt. Frere while falling in love with Sylvia, the Warden's daughter. Meanwhile, back in England, an imposter lays claim to the young man's inheritance.
A frank portrayal of a year in the life of a divorced mother living in Melbourne, trying to cope with her daughter and her own relationship with a drug addict while trying to get into the music business.
