Co-screenwriter Michael Brindley said in an interview with David Stratton in his book 'The Avocado Plantation: Boom and Bust in the Australian Film Industry' (1990): ''Women still come up to us and thank us for writing a film that means so much to them, it really did touch a lot of people.''
The film's director Steve Jodrell has said: ''No-one really wanted to touch it because they couldn't work out what it was about. It was not quite entertaining; it was a little bit too art-house; it was a message film, and yet Michael and Beverly Blenkinship had always designed the film as a kind of B grade drive-in movie. They did not want it to end up in an art-house circuit. They wanted it to be an action flick that had some things to say in it, so that they get to the kind of demographic that they were appealing to, which was young teenagers and people in their twenties - and actually hoping the girls would drag the men along and, therefore, get across what they wanted to say.''
Of the film's ineligibility for the AFI (Australian Film Institute) Awards, David Stratton in his book 'The Avocado Plantation: Boom and Bust in the Australian Film Industry' (1990) states: ''Shame should have scooped the pool at the 1988 AFI awards: instead, it was deemed to be ineligible by Institute officials. The film had been entered in the 1987 awards, but in an incomplete version; as soon as [producer] Paul Barron discovered this, he withdrew it with the approval of the AFI's Awards Manager, who assured him the film could be entered in its completed version the following year...The AFI won no points at all in the industry for its ham-fisted decision over 'Shame', and the film's box-office career undoubtedly suffered as a result of the bureaucratic bungling.''
When the film was released in the United States the picture was at times screening at the same time as 'The Accused' (1988) which was a movie examining the same subject matter. The 'Oz Movies' website states that ''it happened to hit some screens around the same time as the Jodie Foster rape film, The Accused''.
Of the film's ineligibility for the AFI (Australian Film Institute) Awards, producer Paul Barron said: ''We found out that the material supplied was inadequate. When you're based in Perth, it isn't always to (sic) easy to keep on top of that sort of thing. What we sent was a work print, with spaces still in it, which was in no way acceptable. But when it was rejected the following year, and I read in Variety an admission that we had been told we could resubmit it, but that the person who told us that was wrong...Well, I'm no longer a member of the AFI.''