The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) presents a Long Play season of the revealing documentary, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (2010) straight from its award winning screenings on the international film festival circuit. The film takes a look at the private and public life of the legendary comedian Joan Rivers, one of the most hilarious and hard working women in show business.

Following Rivers over the course of her 76th year renowned documentarians Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg are given unguarded access to River's life. The film combines intimate scenes and archive footage to offer insight into Rivers private dramas both past and present. Stripped of her performance masks Rivers lays bare the emotional mix of self-doubt and anger that often fuels her comedic process. Rivers's story is equally contradictory, mixing brutal honesty with laugh-out-loud humour while exposing the ruthlessness of the entertainment business, the darker side of fame, success and everything you might not know about the first lady of comedy.

Since her taboo breaking emergence in the mid-'60s, as one of the few woman comedians, Rivers has made a career for more than forty years out of poking fun at herself and at others. Amongst her long list of credits River's was the first female guest host of The Tonight Show, had and lost her own TV program, toured the world, created a brand in her likeness, written books and made millions of people laugh - and that's just for starters.