HER BRILLIANT CAREER
When Australia is producing hits such as Lion (Garth Davis, 2016) and The Dressmaker (Jocelyn Moorhouse, 2015), it’s difficult to remember that, not too long ago, there was nothing. Gillian Armstrong has seen it all. In 1973, she became one of the twelve students of the Australian Film Television and Radio School’s (AFTRS) inaugural cohort, which also included Phillip Noyce and Chris Noonan. She was also part of the first wave of Australian filmmakers who enjoyed government support after an industry push for a film-development body was enacted by then–prime minister John Gorton in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Armstrong had her breakthrough later in 1973 when, under David Stratton’s reign, the Sydney Film Festival accepted her graduate film, One Hundred a Day, which subsequently won accolades at the AFI Awards and the Adelaide Film Festival. She famously went into feature filmmaking in 1979, with her smash My Brilliant Career; became the first female filmmaker from outside the US to be approached by MGM to make a big-budget feature, Mrs. Soffel (1984); and gave Oscar winners Geoffrey Rush and Cate Blanchett some of their first roles.
In the four decades since Armstrong’s career began, the industry has seen significant shifts – from the cinematic golden age that birthed films like Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) and the overproduction spurred by the 10BA tax offset, to an increased reliance on co-productions and the disappearance of major global independent studios such as Miramax from the 1990s onwards. Armstrong’s last narrative film, 2007’s Death Defying Acts, saw a botched release in much of the world; since then, the director has shifted her creative energies towards documentaries, such as Women He’s Undressed (2015), and television, due to the artistic freedom afforded by the two forms. Her films – apart from those already mentioned, these include Little Women (1994), Oscar and
