Acclaimed Breaker Morant, Driving Miss Daisy and Mao’s Last Dancer Australian director Bruce Beresford returned home to Sydney to film Ladies in Black, the long-awaited big screen adaptation of Madeleine St John’s 1993 best-selling novel, ‘The Women in Black’.

British actress Julia Ormond (Mad Men) joins Australian actors Angourie Rice (Spider-Man: Homecoming, The Beguiled, Every Day) and Rachael Taylor (Jessica Jones, Red Dog,Transformers) along with Alison McGirr (Thirty), Vincent Perez (Queen Margot, Cyrano de Bergerac), Ryan Corr (Holding the Man), Susie Porter (Seven Types of Ambiguity), Shane Jacobson (The Dressmaker) and Noni Hazlehurst (A Place to Call Home).

In the feel-good film, Ladies in Black, high-fashion and glamour are the catalyst for a positive, indelible change in a young Sydney woman’s life. Set in the summer of 1959, when the impact of European migration and the rise of women’s liberation is about to change Australia forever, a shy schoolgirl (Rice) takes a summer job at the grand city department store, Goode’s, while awaiting the results of her final exams. There she meets the “ladies in black” – the glamorous Goode’s employees. Beguiled and influenced by the vivacious manager of the high-fashion floor, and befriended by fellow sales ladies, she grows from a bookish girl to a glamorous and positive young woman, and she herself becomes a catalyst for a cultural change in everyone’s lives.

Amongst Sydney locations, the film has shot exterior scenes outside the vintage 1909 Mark Foy’s CBD Piazza building (now Downing Centre), and also filmed in the Blue Mountains, a short 1.5-hour drive outside of the city.

The film is produced by Allanah Zitserman and Sue Milliken. The screenplay was adapted from the novel by Beresford and Milliken.

Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions’ Stage 6 Films is the worldwide distributor with the film receiving major production investment from Screen Australia in association with Create NSW.