My Brilliant Career | |
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Directed by | Gillian Armstrong |
Screenplay by | Eleanor Witcombe |
Based on | My Brilliant Career 1901 novel by Miles Franklin |
Produced by | Margaret Fink |
Starring | |
Cinematography | Donald McAlpine |
Edited by | Nicholas Beauman |
Music by | Nathan Waks |
Production companies | The New South Wales Film Corporation Margaret Fink Productions |
Distributed by | GUO Film Distributors |
Release date |
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Running time | 100 minutes |
Country | Australia |
Language | English |
Budget | AU$890,000[1] |
Box office | AU$3,052,000 (Australia) $2.5 million (US/Canada)[2] |
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 AACTA 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. 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.