Bliss

Director: Ray Lawrence
Screenwriters: Peter Carey, Ray Lawrence

Institute History

  • 1986 Sundance Film Festival

Description

Bliss won the 1985 Australian Film Institute Awards for Best Feature Film, Best Achievement in Direction and Best Adapted Screenplay. It arrives with controversy from the Cannes and New York Film Festivals—bound to generate more hers.

Harry Joy (Barry Otto), a happily married businessman, suffers a heart attack during a family outing. For a few moments he is “out of body,” witnessing his own death. He returns to life, but with a new and bizarre take on his surroundings. Bliss is an unusual film for Australia. With debts to Fellini and Monty Python, it is deeply absorbed in explicit, often perverse fantasies, outrageous humor and the hermetic world of inner monologues. By all accounts, Bliss, by first time filmmaker Ray Lawrence, is a fresh and wickedly original work.

Screening Details

Credits

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