24 Films & TV Shows Set In Oceania During The 1950s
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Ladies in Black
New South Wales The 1960s The 1950sAdapted from the bestselling novel by Madeleine St John, Ladies in Black is an alluring and tender-hearted comedy drama about the lives of a group of department store employees in 1959 Sydney.
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Spirit of the Game
🇦🇺 Australia The 1950sIn the lead up to the 1956 Olympic games, a group of missionaries are tasked with helping the fledgling Australian basketball team compete in their first ever Olympics, and in doing so, unite a nation still coming to grips after the war.
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The Dressmaker
🇦🇺 Australia The 1950s The 1920sRevenge is back in fashion — In 1950s Australia, beautiful, talented dressmaker Tilly returns to her tiny hometown to right wrongs from her past. As she tries to reconcile with her mother, she starts to fall in love while transforming the fashion of the town.
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Bhaag Milkha Bhaag
🇵🇰 Pakistan 🇮🇹 Italy Victoria The 1960s The 1950sNow you will see his Real Story. — The true story of the "Flying Sikh" world champion runner and Olympian Milkha Singh who overcame the massacre of his family, civil war during the India-Pakistan partition, and homelessness to become one of India's most iconic athletes.
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Mabo
Queensland The 1970s The 1980s The 1990s The 1960s The 1950sThe true story of one man's epic fight to change a nation. — Mabo tells the story of one of Australia's national heroes - Eddie Koiki Mabo, the Torres Strait Islander who left school at age 15, yet spearheaded the High Court challenge that overthrew the fiction of terra nullius.
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Children of Glory
🇭🇺 Hungary Victoria The 1950sChildren of Glory will commemorate Hungary's heroic Revolution of 1956, and takes place in Budapest and at the Melbourne Olympic Games in October and November of that year. While Soviet tanks were destroying Hungary, the Hungarian water polo team was winning over the Soviets in the Olympic pool in Melbourne, in what has been described as the bloodiest water polo match in history.
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Freedom's Fury
Victoria The 1950sA documentary on the 1956 Olympic semifinal water polo match between Hungary and Russia. Held in Australia, the match occurred as Russian forces were in Budapest, stomping out a popular revolt.
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Love's Brother
🇦🇺 Australia The 1950sSet in rural Australia and Tuscany in the 1950's, this is the story of two brothers and the bride who - as fate would have it - arrives from Italy betrothed to one yet falls madly in love with the other.
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Swimming Upstream
Queensland The 1950s The 1960sA young man aspiring for recognition of his talents battles against his estranged father's sentiment towards him as the father deals with his own demons.
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Black and White
South Australia The 1950sOne man's conviction divided a nation — Australia, 1958. When a nine year old white girl is found murdered, police are quick to arrest illiterate Aborigine, Max Stuart. Under interrogation Max admits to the killing and signs a statement that will send him to the gallows. With no Court of Appeal established in the country, and with a legal system compromised by intimidation tactics and the stain of institutional racism, the skills of his two gifted but naive defense lawyers are put to the test. Based on a true story.
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The Other Side of Heaven
Idaho California 🇹🇴 Tonga The 1950sAn Epic Journey. — John H. Groberg, a middle class kid from Idaho Falls, crosses the Pacific to become a Mormon missionary in the remote and exotic Tongan island kingdom during the 1950's. He leaves behind a loving family and the true love of his life, Jean. Through letters and musings across the miles, John shares his humbling and sometimes hilarious adventures with "the girl back home", and her letters buoy up his spirits in difficult times. John must struggle to overcome language barriers, physical hardship and deep-rooted suspicion to earn the trust and love of the Tongan people he has come to serve. Throughout his adventure-filled three years on the islands, he discovers friends and wisdom in the most unlikely places. John H. Groberg's Tongan odyssey will change his life forever.
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The Magic Pudding
🇦🇺 Australia 🇦🇶 Antarctica The 1960s The 1950sMeet Albert, The Magic Pudding, Bunyip Bluegum, a splendid young koala and his seafaring friends Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff. Together they fight off the bungled attempts of pudding thieves, Possum and Wombat, and try to solve the mystery of Bunyip's parents' disappearance.
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Shine
England Western Australia The 1970s The 1980s The 1960s The 1950sA true story of the mystery of music and the miracle of love — Pianist David Helfgott, driven by his father and teachers, has a breakdown. Years later he returns to the piano, to popular if not critical acclaim.
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Children of the Revolution
🇷🇺 Russia New South Wales The 1950s The 1990sA red comedy about the ultimate party animals. — A man (Richard Roxburgh) the Australian government blames for 1990s political woes blames his mother (Judy Davis), a communist Stalin seduced in 1951.
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Heavenly Creatures
🇳🇿 New Zealand The 1950sNot all angels are innocent. — Wealthy and precocious teenager Juliet transfers from England to New Zealand with her family, and soon befriends the quiet, brooding Pauline through their shared love of fantasy and literature. When their parents begin to suspect that their increasingly intense and obsessive bond is becoming unhealthy, the girls hatch a dark plan for those who threaten to keep them apart.
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The Silver Brumby
Victoria The 1950sThe magic of the mountain. The obsession of a man. The beauty of the Silver Brumby. — A mother tells her daughter a fable about the prince of the brumbies, brumby being a term for the feral horses of Australia, who must find its place among its kind, while one man makes it his mission to capture it and tame it. Australian adaptation of Elyne Mitchell's "The silver Brumby".
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Bread & Roses
🇳🇿 New Zealand The 1950s The 1940sA survivor for whom mere survival was not enough — Based upon the life of activist and trade unionist (and later MP) Sonja Davies. The film covers her life up to 1956, when, at age 33, she was elected to the Nelson Hospital Board. During this period she develops strong socialist beliefs, marries and divorces, at age 17 trains as a nurse, has a romance (and a child) with an American marine who is killed in WWII action. She battles tuberculosis and marries a former boyfriend when he returns from the war. She becomes part of a women's ill-fated campaign to save the Nelson railway line from closure and begins to be elected to political bodies.
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The Delinquents
Victoria Queensland The 1950sSome rules were meant to be broken. — A small town in Australia, in the late 1950s: Brownie and Lola are deeply in love. But because they are under-age, their parents are against their relationship and try to separate them.
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Celia
Victoria The 1950sChild Of Terror — Set in mid 1950s Australia, with the fear of communism in the air and the country's farmlands overrun by a plague of rabbits, the film depicts a long hot summer seen through the eyes and over-active imagination of nine year old Celia. Shaken by the death of her beloved Grandmother, Celia finds herself adrift between the cruel games and rituals of childhood and the incomprehensible world of grown-ups. With monstrous creatures stalking her dreams by night, those imagined terrors blur by day with the banal brutality of the adult world and lead to tragic and shocking consequences.
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Dawn!
🇦🇺 Australia The 1950s The 1960s The 1970sThe movie reveals what the headlines concealed. — Dawn! is a 1979 Australian sports biopic about the three-time Olympic gold medallist swimmer Dawn Fraser.
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The Devil's Playground
Victoria The 1950sA powerful drama relating the intimate aspect of teenage boys and their priest/educators behind the walls of a religious institution where rigid discipline backfires natural feelings are deemed unnatural acts and human lives are controlled in the names of good intentions.
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Under the Flag of the Rising Sun
Tokyo Prefecture 🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea The 1970s The 1950s The 1940sA war widow determined to clear the name of her disgraced husband, who was court-martialed for desertion and executed. Official records have been destroyed, and the ministry that distributes benefits continues to deny her a pension. Twenty-six years after the war, she seeks out four survivors of her husband's garrison. Each tells a dramatically different story about her husband's conduct, but she is determined to learn the truth.
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They're a Weird Mob
New South Wales The 1950s The 1960sNino Culotta is an Italian immigrant, newly arrived in Australia, and attempts to understand the aspirational values and social rituals of everyday urban Australians of the 1950s and '60s.... and assimilate.
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Geordie
Scotland Victoria The 1950sA Giant Among Comedies — Concerned about his small stature, a young Scottish boy applies for a mail-order body building course, successfully gaining both height and strength. The film was released as "Wee Geordie" in the USA.
