‘Bookie Robbery’ and ‘Custody’ Highlight Australian Festival

“Back of Beyond,” the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s monumental and unprecedented survey of Australian cinema and TV, this week offers an embarrassment of riches both old and new, all of them unfamiliar to American audiences.

Tonight brings “The Great Bookie Robbery” (screening at 8 in Melnitz Theater), a 1986 miniseries based on Australia’s most famous unsolved heist that puts most of its American equivalents to shame. It opens with a crack Australian thief (John Bach) using a furlough from an English prison to fly to Australia to set up a bank job that will finance the big caper intended to allow him to retire permanently from a life of crime. “The Great Bookie Robbery,” directed by Mark Joffe and Marcus Cole, is shamelessly entertaining yet terse and intelligent. New Zealand’s lean, blond Bach exudes a quiet star authority.

“The Great Bookie Robbery” seems a natural for American audiences and so does Ian Munro’s brand-new “Custody” (screening Thursday at 7:30 p.m.). Writers Anne Charlton and Anna Grieve have devised a fictional story and placed it in a real-life context; in other words, the actors, cast as the warring Bryans and their two children, are playing opposite actual members of the legal profession in improvised situations. This demanding approach pays off with an extraordinary sense of realism that makes the painful disintegration of a family all the more palpable.

Screening Sunday at 1 p.m. are two thoroughly enjoyable documentaries. Michael Blakemore’s “A Personal History of the Surf” (1981) is the distinguished London stage director’s good-natured reminiscence of growing up in Australia as the son of a successful doctor. A classic Aussie macho male, the father was less than thrilled with Blakemore’s lack of interest in rugby (from which he was saved by braces on his teeth) and his love of magic, the movies and the theater. Luckily, both father and son loved the surf and surfing, and in this shared passion Blakemore is able to look back with much affection for both his late father and his native country.

“Whatever Happened to Green Valley,” Peter Weir’s last work (1973) for Film Australia before graduating to feature films, begins with his spoof of glib, negative TV reportage on a vast subsidized-housing tract built between 1961-64 in suburban Sydney. He shows it to an audience of residents as a provocative curtain-raiser to a series of shorts some locals made with his help and which tell a far different story. Yes, there is a lack of recreational facilities for teen-agers and other problems familiar to all American suburbanites, but on the whole these hard-working, realistic blue-collar people are grateful to be living in Green Valley. If anything, Weir’s commentary on media distortion and sensationalism--demonstrating the ways in which film can heighten and arouse community consciousness--is timelier than ever. For further information: (213) 206-8013, 206-FILM.

Enterprising young film maker Buz Alexander is presenting “New Directors--New Visions” Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The evening of four student films includes his own “The Visitor,” an impressive adaptation of a Ray Bradbury short story about a young man--condemned to a desert exile with others afflicted with “blood rust”--who has a wonderful but treacherous gift of conjuring other times and places. It’s marked by stunning visuals and special effects.

The other three films are all set in rural or small-town America. Susan J. Emshwiller’s “Breakfast Messages” is a deft and amusing would-be romance between a diner cook (John Naehrlich) and a pretty customer (Laura Cooper). Toni Marie Gibson’s “Truck Stop,” the most mature work of the group, is a sensitive, observant study of a woman (well played by Jo Anne Kerman) in her 30s who sees in her lover (Jack Radosta) a way of escaping her hometown. Steven Ramiriz’s “Rancho California” is an amiable but meandering vignette involving a brother and sister living on the family ranch. Unexpected dividend: veteran actress Rose Hobart turning up to play their perky aunt. Tony Bill will host the event. Information: (213) 396-3115.