The Year My Voice Broke

The film is set in a small New South Wales town in 1962. Danny, fifteen, is in love with Freya, his closest friend since childhood. Freya turns instead to Trevor, the town's rough young rugby player. Danny has to watch it happen. At the same time the town has a past that everyone knows and nobody discusses, and that past has directly to do with who Freya is. John Duigan's film does not turn adolescence into nostalgia; the town is small, closed and cruel, and what the children go through is less a first love than a loss. It is Noah Taylor's first film and Ben Mendelsohn's first substantial part. It won the Australian Film Institute award for best film in 1987. Duigan made a second film with the same character, Flirting, in 1991.