Early Film
Dirt Cheap
Feature (1981)
Traditional Aboriginal Landowners in Northern Australia battle to keep multinational uranium mining off their land.
‘Provocative and persuasive’, ‘Daily Telegraph’, London.
‘A remarkable example of the committed documentary’, Sydney Morning Herald.
Cineprobe Festival, the Museum of Modern Art. Margaret Mead Film Festival, the Museum of Natural History.
David Hay: Director/Co-Producer
Early Film
Me & Daphne
(1979)
Based on a story by Lillian Rosser, the film follows 16-year-old Daphne on the first day of her working life: at a chicken processing plant in Sydney. Hounded by an over-protective mother and by immigrant women she’s never met, Daphne realizes her future could be a catastrophe.
Cast: Julie Hamilton, Cheryl Woods.
David Hay: Director, Co-screenwriter
Early Film
The Spirit of Seventy Six
(1975)
“A model of the dramatized documentary. A wage slave of 20 years’ standing begins to dream of his own little business. He weights the risk and pays the price – he gets sucked up in the vortex of the ass-end of capitalism: longer hours, less income, relations with his wife polluted by business preoccupations, an inability to make it in bed and in the marketplace, and a big company soft soaping him before wringing him dry and throwing him on the scrapheap of failed enterprises. The dream of being your own boss becomes a nightmare.
‘The Spirit of ‘76’ succeeds because the accuracy and succinctness of the characters and manners, the economy, relevance, and momentum of its key scenes. The fiction, the case history and the argument are in mutual reinforcement – a rare amalgam.” John Flaus, ‘Cinema Papers’.
Cast: Vincent Cobb, Karen Cobb.
Director/Screenwriter: David Hay.
Cinematographer: Elliot Davis.
Shot on location in Los Angeles.