Set in Sydney, Susan Lambert’s politically charged feminist thriller On Guard (1984) follows four women on a mission to sabotage a supercomputer holding ten years’ worth of data on IVF research. On Guard saw a future (and responded to a recent past) in which women take back control of their reproductive systems, and livelihoods. Informed by the burgeoning women’s movement of the 1970s, the film posited a new world of radical feminism with the scrappy aesthetics of underground punk cinema. With Australian women recently rising up yet again with tales of high-level institutional violation, rape and other crimes recently reported, this film is as urgent and welcomed as ever. 

On Guard screens in a double bill with The Handmaid’s Tale (1990). 

Past Futures curatorial notes —
What futures were past filmmakers imagining for our present world? And did those sci fi prophesies come true? All dreamers and designers start from a place of deep imagining.

In Past Futures we look at imagined dystopias and utopias that made their way into the collective conscious – into the design of now – and consider what might be in the making to come.

Presented by The Capitol as part of Melbourne Design Week 2021, an initiative of the Victorian Government in collaboration with the NGV.