Jim Loach/ UK/Australia/ 2010/ 105 min/ 15
Showing as part of the Glasgow Film Festival @ GFT, 25th – 26th February
Jim Loach, son of Ken and veteran telly director, brings us his movie debut Oranges and Sunshine, a film that highlights the plight of children relocated en masse from the UK to Australia. A social worker working in Nottingham, Margaret Humphreys (Emily Watson), mediating an adoption support group, is approached by an Australian woman claiming to have been shipped from England as a young child after being put in care. She seeks her unknown mother in Nottingham but can’t find her. Humphreys is perplexed because what the woman alleges is not legal, but the woman insists that this is what happened to her. When another woman in Humphreys’s support group tells a similar story about her long lost brother, this spurs her on a personal investigation into a national scandal. The film tells the true story of one woman’s exposé of a collusion between governments, local authorities, charities and churches in deporting British children in care to the ex-colonies, a practice which went on from the Victorian era right up to as recently as 1970.
This is an important film about a major scandal affecting hundreds of thousands of people, which Gordon Brown only formally apologised for last year. It has the approval of the real Margaret Humphreys and has attracted such acting heavyweights as Watson and Hugo Weaving. Unfortunately, this genuinely heart-wrenching and involving true story is let down by a clunky, mechanical screenplay and dialogue that has the feel of a Guardian feature article. The high caliber actors are stuck with awkward lines like “You’re talking about the organised deportation of children in care!” and overall, Oranges and Sunshine would feel more at home on the TV. Still, it does have serious educational value and does a decent enough job of raising the profile of an otherwise forgotten scandal.