Thirst (2012 film)

Thirst is an Australian desert drama written and directed by Robert Carter, and starring Victoria Haralabidou, Myles Pollard, Hanna Mangan-Lawrence and Tom Green. Thirst is about four individuals who become stranded in the desert with limited water, and are forced to make choices that challenge their ideas of themselves and what they truly need.

Set in 2017, four people isolated in their different ways, are trapped, with little water, in the desert outback of Australia. Against impossible odds can they find meaning, connection, laughter... even love before it is too late?

Kit, a beautiful 18-year-old, fostered since birth, goes on the run with 17-year-old Zac, the son of her foster family following a near fatal shooting. They head for the desert where Kit remembers seeing on television abandoned mining huts where they could take refuge.

In the desert, living in just such a hut, a woman, Minna searches for something mysterious, digging deep holes everywhere. When a mining company employee, Boyce, arrives from head office to take Minna back to the city, several days drive away, she refuses to go. A violent struggle ensues and the two become stranded with no way back.

Kit and Zac, out of petrol, arrive and the four are reluctantly thrust together to survive.

Boyce, a wise-cracking, failed comedian; Minna, intelligent scientist, obsessively searching for something mysterious; Kit, drop-dead gorgeous, believing she cannot love; Zac, crazy for Kit but with no idea how to connect.

Isolated in their different ways, the four are forced to make choices that challenge their ideas of themselves, expose their true needs, and offer the chance to live a whole life in a day.

Only when there is no future does the possibility exist to live fully in the moment. With no reason to hold onto the past nor save ourselves for future possibilities, we are free to see what is left of the day, to expose ourselves, to face unwanted truths, and to take the biggest risk of all – to open to our own capacity to love.

Thirst brings together four people isolated and alone in four different ways and traps them in the desert with little water and no means of escape. How will they react? What will they do? How will they make sense of their lives? What will become important? Can they find meaning - something larger than themselves?

Carl Jung said that most of the unhappy people who came to see him suffered not from some clinical illness but from the meaningless and emptiness of their lives. For me, Thirst is about forcing to the surface deeply protected and vulnerable human needs and exposing them to light and life.

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Wikipedia