| Sunday Too Far Away | |
|---|---|
 DVD Cover | |
| Directed by | Ken Hannam |
| Written by | John Dingwall |
| Produced by | Gil Brealey Matt Carroll |
| Starring | Jack Thompson Robert Bruning Reg Lye Max Cullen Peter Cummins John Ewart |
| Cinematography | Geoff Burton |
| Edited by | Rod Adamson |
| Music by | Patrick Flynn |
Production company | |
| Distributed by | Roadshow Film Distributors |
Release date |
|
Running time | 94 minutes |
| Country | Australia |
| Language | English |
| Budget | A$300,000[1] |
| Box office | A$1.356 million (Australia) |
Sunday Too Far Away is a 1975 Australian drama film directed by Ken Hannam. It belongs to the Australian Film Renaissance or the "Australian New Wave", which occurred during that decade.
The film is set on a sheep station in the Australian outback in 1955 and its action concentrates on the shearers' reactions to a threat to their bonuses and the arrival of non-union labour.
Acclaimed for its understated realism of the work, camaraderie and general life of the shearer, Jack Thompson plays the knock-about Foley, a heavy drinking gun shearer (talented professional sheep shearer), and while he makes a play for the station owner's daughter Sheila (Lisa Peers), the film is a presentation of various aspects of Australian male culture and not a romance; the film's title itself is reputedly the lament of an Australian shearer's wife: "Friday night [he's] too tired; Saturday night too drunk; Sunday, too far away".[2]
Sunday Too Far Away won three 1975 Australian Film Institute awards: Best Film, Best Actor in a Leading Role and Best Actor in a Supporting Role.
- ^ Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper, Australian Film 1900–1977: A Guide to Feature Film Production, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998 p287
- ^ Rees, Nigel. Mark My Words: Great Quotations and the Stories Behind Them. Barnes & Noble, Inc., 2002. ISBN 0760735328, p. 30