Thursday's Fictions (ATOM Study Guide)

This study guide to accompany Thursday's Fictions, a film by The Physical TV Company, has been written for middle and senior secondary students. It provides information and suggestions for learning activities in Dance, English and Media.

In a world where people only live for the length of a day, Thursday is running out of time. When Thursday finds out that her twenty-four hours are almost up and that she is going to be reincarnated as Tuesday, she tries to cheat the cycle. Thursday packs her belongings into a trunk so that she will be able to continue her work when she returns in her next life. Her actions unleash terrible beauty and turmoil. When the other days of the week discover Thursday's trunk, they grapple with the passion, beauty, dreams and nightmares which it contains.

Thursday's Fictions is a post-modern hybrid film in which dance, music, drama and cinematography are blended together to create a work of art. The world of Thursday's Fictions is epic and intense. Richard James Allen likens the film to an opera given its flamboyant pageant of colour and texture, its exploration of grand themes and larger than life performances. The drama in Thursday's Fictions functions like recitative and the dance is comparable to aria.

Thursday's Fictions is based on Allen's book of the same title, which as nominated for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry at the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards.