About

Across a career now entering its fifth decade, New Zealander Jane Campion has established herself as one of the most acclaimed and fearless directorial voices in contemporary cinema. Winner of multiple Academy Awards and the first female filmmaker to be awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, her films have been celebrated for their unique vision and subversive portrayals of women rejecting the strictures of their societies. This program presents all of Campion’s features to date, along with a curated selection of her short films.

After studying filmmaking at Sydney’s Australian Film, Television and Radio School in the early 1980s, the success of Campion’s early shorts – including a Short Film Palme d’or for Peel 1982 – led to the personal tales of friendship and sisterhood found in feature films Two Friends 1986 and Sweetie 1989. Campion would reach new heights of success with The Piano 1993, a critical and commercial triumph that remains her most iconic work.

Over the subsequent years, she continued to craft enthralling portraits of characters who push back against the constraints of social hierarchies and patriarchal pressures, whether that be in period settings (The Portrait of a Lady 1996, Bright Star 2009) or amidst contemporary concerns (Holy Smoke 1999, In the Cut 2003). Her most recent production – The Power of the Dog 2021 – was Campion’s first feature in over a decade and won her the Academy Award for Best Director, highlighting the continued vitality of her filmmaking.

Program curated by Robert Hughes, Australian Cinémathèque.

QAGOMA acknowledges the generous assistance of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Canberra in providing materials for this program.