My Brilliant Career (film)

My Brilliant Career
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Gillian Armstrong
Screenplay by	Eleanor Witcombe
Based on	My Brilliant Career 1901 novel by Miles Franklin
Produced by	Margaret Fink
Starring	Judy Davis Sam Neill Wendy Hughes
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	17 August 1979 (1979-08-17)
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.