The Pursuit of Happiness (1988 film)

The Pursuit of Happiness is a 1988 Australian film directed by Martha Ansara.[1][2]

In the mid 1980s Ansara was involved in the Australian anti-nuclear movement and wanted to make a film about Australia's relationship with the US. She originally intended to make a documentary but then it evolved into a dramatic feature about a married relationship that acted as a paradigm for the US-Australia relationship. Ansara:

It was a bit of a crude analysis, but it took so long to make (under the 10BA system) that by the time we finished the film - it was 1987 - for various reasons, the anti-nuclear movement was on the way out, so the film missed its time. And with films, timing is everything. If we had done it in a year, which we couldn't, it probably would have done very, very well. As it was, it did return 40 percent to the investors, but that was because it was very low-budget. The interesting thing about the film is that, if the audience was not very sophisticated, they liked it enormously. If they were sophisticated, they thought it was really daggy.[3]