Review by W.A. critic Mark Naglazas
May 2, 2026
One of the most fascinating films ever made in Western Australia, Martha Ansara’s1987 Fremantle-set anti-war docudrama PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS, is getting a rare one-off screening at the Luna tomorrow evening (and in a lovely NFSA 2D restoration).
Set against the wildly contradictory backdrop of the America’s Cup and the protests against the arrival of nuclear-armed American warships, PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS is centred on a journalist named Anna (played by WAPAA graduate Laura Black) who sets out to unravel the complexities and dark secrets of the Australian-US military alliance.
Complicating Anna’s investigation is the deep political split within her family. Her Freo councillor husband John (Peter Hardy) is gung-ho for the American presence in the port city and doing deals that will secure the family’s future, while her musician-daughter Mandy (Anna Gare of The Jam Tarts) has been drawn into the protest movement (this being the 1980s, the personal is deeply political).
As she digs deeper Anna starts to suspect that the America’s Cup is not just a rich man’s sporting event but a part of a conspiracy to bind Australia deeper into the US’s plan to fight and survive a nuclear war, with our bases a crucial part of their first-strike scheme.
What makes PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS such an extraordinary document of the era and genuinely intelligent cinema is the way in which Ansara has woven together the fictional and the factual, with news and documentary footage and key figures from the era, such Nuclear Disarmament Party senator Jo Vallentine, seamlessly stitched into Anna’s dogged investigation. It gives the film incredible authenticity.
Indeed, some of the documentary scenes play out so powerfully you struggle to believe that Ansara hasn’t scripted them and used real actors, such as the astounding ANZAC Day sequence which culminates in a group of diggers in a pub telling war stories, including one horrific tale from the freshly obliterated Hiroshima.
Equally well done is the sequence in which Labor celebrates its thumping 1987 election victory, with David Parker all smiles after being re-elected as member for Fremantle and Vallentine looking into the camera and telling reporter Liz Wood that her increased vote count indicated deep concern in the community for the nuclear-armed ships on our shores.
And, as mentioned, the personal looms as large as the political, with Black delivering a rich, intriguing first-person narration about her struggles to reconcile the demands of being a mother and the wife of a prominent businessman and her daughter’s rapidly expanding political consciousness.
Ansara also draws a provocative parallel between a woman seeking independence from her old-school patriarchal husband and the need for Australia to break free from the United States.
And the climax is flat-out amazing, with a flotilla of peace protestors greeting the US fleet and art and life colliding in Gauge Roads.
Martha tells me that they spent weeks trying to find out when the ships were arriving. When the US consul refused to give up the information she went to brothels in Northbridge to see if the sex workers had any information.
In the end Martha went ahead and scheduled the shoot and God provided the fleet and her million-dollar shot.
PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS is both a remarkable document of a crucial period in Fremantle and Western Australian history — the footage will send older audiences tumbling back to a heady period — and a reminder to those concerned about AUKUS that this problem of the Australian-American military alliance has been around for generations.