Directed by Bill Mousoulis
Written by Bill Mousoulis and Ali Alizadeh    Director of Photography Shyam Ediriweera
Production Designer Jenna Davis    Make-up & FX Linda Maiden
Music by Spider Goat Canyon

Featuring: Alex Spears, Vanessa de Largie, Patrick Boyle, HaiHa Le, Jennifer Levy.

Z and X are a vampire couple, living in an old warehouse in inner-city Melbourne.
Over the course of one night, they go about their regular business,
teaming up with the poet-cannibal Seers and another vampire Vee.
After a strange encounter with the mysterious Rola, the fabric of
Z and X's world begins to change. A philosophical vampire film.

SD, from HD original

Distributed by Troma Entertainment

Go to A Nocturne feature page

Reviews: "After making several well-regarded art films, director Bill Mousoulis has turned his hand to the genre of vampire film, with stunning results. A Nocturne is perhaps the most wildly original and stunningly beautiful vampire film I have ever seen. This is Melbourne indie cinema's own very answer to Kathryn Bigelow's 1987 masterpiece Near Dark, for its radical reworking of the rules of the genre, but closer in style to Jean Rollin's Fascination or The Living Dead Girl for its poetically haunting imagery." - Tony McMahon, In-Press Magazine, Sep 2007.

"Bill Mousoulis' deliberately abrasive A Nocturne is as minimally plotted as his other work, and as concerned with solitary obsessives - even if this time round most of them are vampires. As usual with Mousoulis, the ever-present threat of banality is a main theme. A visiting Frenchwoman tells her bloodsucking proteges they've reached a dead end, and a tour-de-force montage sequence suggests the real horrors are to be found in daylight: the pedestrians crossing the street in unison are literally controlled by machines." - Jake Wilson, The Age, Sep 2007.

"Melbourne-based, independent filmmaker Bill Mousoulis' latest offering, A Nocturne (2007), is an intriguing reworking of the vampire genre. In a career spanning 25 years, Mousoulis has rarely treaded either genre or conventional narrative terrain. His films, rather, resemble raw, delicate, carefully devised offerings from filmmaker to audience in which the filmmaker shares his view of the world, humanity, desire, love, emotion. This view finds its formal expression not via conventional narrative or genre, but rather a certain realism that aims to honestly channel the emotional and spiritual world of its characters. Though A Nocturne may signal a new direction of some kind for Mousoulis, the film remains consistent with the themes and ideas he has explored thus far. As in previous Mousoulis films, A Nocturne sets up an opposition between commerce and art; mainstream and alternative space; the ruthlessness of capitalist society and the humanity of the artist." - Fiona Villella, Senses of Cinema, March 2008.

"Steeped in Goth chic, A Nocturne doesn’t skimp on the ensanguined visual eroticism proper to the tradition of poverty row fangfests. And lead actress Vanessa de Largie compellingly incarnates the genre staple blood drinking lady-vamp. Yet the cinematic genealogy that I’m trying to claim for A Nocturne has deeper and more interesting implications than Halloween party iconography. It also concerns the radical privileging of moments of extreme affective intensity chiefly arising from an intense engagement with performative physicality and narrative disorientation over the smooth unfolding of traditional linear storytelling .... It is a film structured less around a causal progression of events than a moody, random alternation of states of consciousness resulting ultimately in a starkly existential statement." - Maximilian Le Cain, Experimental Conversations, Spring 2009.

Screenings: 17, including at Melbourne Underground Film Festival, 2007; 26th Brussels International Festival of Fantastic Film, March 2008; 14th Athens International Film Festival, Sep 2008; 53rd Cork Film Festival, Oct 2008.

Awards: Best Film, Best Actress (Vanessa de Largie), Best Editing (Bill Mousoulis) at Melbourne Underground Film Festival, 2007.