Sunday Too Far Away

Easily one of the best of the 'new' Australian films: an outback variant on the Hawksian Hollywood formula of male camaraderie and competitive professionalism, set on an isolated sheep station where the shearing sheds become both a personal and a political testing ground for notions of individualism and collectivism. Marked by an unemphatic but affecting poignancy that owes nothing to nostalgia (though it's set in 1955) or spurious romanticism, the film trades of a resonant matter-of-fact engagement with character against any temptation to strain the material towards 'epic' statement or national myth.