Gillian Armstrong’s “My Brilliant Career” will kick off a 20-film series honoring women filmmakers in the Land Down Under. Titled “Pioneering Women in Australian Cinema” and focusing primarily on films in the 1980s and ’90s, the event will run from July 21-August 14 at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.
A period drama about an aspiring writer, 1979’s”My Brilliant Career” marked the “first Australian feature directed by a woman since those made by the McDonagh sisters in the early 1930s,” per a press release from the museum.
The film series “encompasses comedy, musical, romance, and horror, as well as more underrepresented essayistic, autobiographical, documentary, and experimental styles into a revised cinematic historiography.” Titles set to screen include Tracey Moffatt’s “BeDevil,” a 1993 horror pic centered around ghost stories that made history as the first feature film directed by an Indigenous Australian woman, and Jocelyn Moorhouse’s “Proof,” a 1991 portrait of a blind photographer.
“This series pays tribute to the women directors who emerged in the eighties and nineties, highlighting the contributions of queer, feminist, migrant, and Indigenous women filmmakers and their stories, which are focused on class, work, education, friendship, and — as always for such a geographically isolated country — dreams,” said series curator Michelle Carey. This series originated in “Pioneering Women,” which Carey curated for the Melbourne International Film Festival with Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.
More information about “Pioneering Women in Australian Cinema” can be found on the museum’s website.
