My Brilliant Career (1979)

Directed by

Gillian Armstrong

Genre

drama film, comedy film, romance film, coming-of-age film

Country

Australia

Runtime

1h 42m

Rated

G

Rating

6.2 of 10 from 78 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

In rural Australia at the end of the 19th century, a young woman wants to be a writer. Her family's poverty and a growing romance with a local landowner threaten that ambition.

aspirationaldeterminedromanticperiodfrustratedthoughtfulbittersweetlyrical

What happens

My Brilliant Career is a 1979 Australian period drama film directed by Gillian Armstrong, and starring Judy Davis, Sam Neill, and Wendy Hughes. Based on the 1901 novel of the same name by Miles Franklin, it follows a young woman in rural, late-19th-century Australia whose aspirations to become a writer are impeded first by her social circumstance, and later by a budding romance. Filmed in the Monaro region, New South Wales in 1978, My Brilliant Career was released in Australia in August 1979, and later premiered in the United States at the New York Film Festival. It received significant critical acclaim, and was nominated for numerous AFI Awards, winning three, while Davis won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. In the United States, it received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Costume Design, and the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Film. Contemporarily, the film is regarded as being part of the Australian New Wave of cinema, as well as a piece of feminist cinema. In 2018, it underwent restoration by the Australian National Sound and Film Archive, and was issued on Blu-ray and DVD by the Criterion Collection the following year. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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