Sun 13 Nov 2011: "Oranges and Sunshine" -- a modern film classic from ChOC
This event is in the past.
Oranges and Sunshine
(2011) cert 15, 1hr 40mins
Memorial Hall, Charlbury 7.30pm (bar open from 6.45)
Tickets £5
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Oranges and Sunshine tells the true story of Margaret Humphreys (Emily Watson), a social worker from Nottingham, who uncovered one of the most significant social scandals of recent times; the mass deportation of children from the United Kingdom to Australia.
Single-handedly and against overwhelming odds, Margaret reunited thousands of families and drew worldwide attention to an extraordinary miscarriage of justice. Children as young as four had been told that their parents were dead and sent to children's homes on the other side of the world, where many were subjected to appalling abuse. These forgotten children were promised Oranges and Sunshine but they got hard labour and life in institutions.
The first film to be directed by Jim Loach, Ken Loach's son, who has inherited his father's skills and hits the ground running.
Jim Loach follows in dad's footsteps with a compassionate investigative drama about the wave of UK-to-Australia child migration in the 1950s, and the many sundered families left in the dark. Daily Telegraph
Loach has made a film uncluttered by an obvious director's stamp, peopled by sympathetic characters and driven by a desire to say something about the world without losing sight of human experience. Time Out
A powerful, admirably restrained, real-life drama. Film4
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Philip French writes in The Observer:
"Jim Loach's debut is a powerful, deeply moving, understated account of a major social injustice that went unreported for many years and only this past year received an official apology from the two governments involved, those of Great Britain and Australia.
The picture is seen almost entirely from the point of view of a Nottingham social worker, Margaret Humphreys (a luminous performance of undemonstrative decency from Emily Watson), who stumbled across the story of 130,000 working-class British children separated from their families and siblings and sent to Australia between the end of the second world war and the early 1970s.
Some were orphans, some weren't."
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More reviews and the trailer are at www.chocfilms.info
Buy tickets here or on the door