Hottoceame The Age of Commercialism

Spoonixel Amateur movie with Big budget

Helloturia I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

SnoopyStyle It's 1986 Nottingham, England. Social worker Margaret Humphreys (Emily Watson) leads a support group. She is confronted by a woman looking for her mother's identity. She reveals that she was one of hundreds of orphans on a ship sent to Australia. Margaret investigates and finds that the mother is still alive. She was an unwed mother and told that her baby was adopted. A woman in Margaret's group was reunited with her brother Jack (Hugo Weaving) who was promised oranges and sunshine in Australia but was abused instead. Margaret goes to Australia and discovers a more massive issue than expected. Len (David Wenham) is a belligerent deportee. Margaret faces backlash over the scandal against the religious orders. In the end, there was more than 130k children deported from Britain to the far flung reaches of the empire.This little known history is compelling. Watson delivers a sincere performance. There are some solid acting. Weaving does the heavy emotional lifting. Wenham's belligerence is a welcome different take on the victimization. There isn't much of a story. There is no real drama. The backlash generates a little bit of tension. Overall, it's eye-opening history although it could have used some flashbacks to the children's deportation.

Prismark10 This film was written by Rona Munro a noted playwright who has also worked in film, television, radio and various genres including science fiction as she wrote that last ever story for the original run of Doctor Who. The film is based on the the book 'Empty Cradles' by social worker Margaret Humphreys that highlights her real life tale of the supposedly orphaned children sent to Australia and their fight to discover or be reunited with their real parents.The film is directed by Jim Loach, son of radical film maker Ken Loach and together they make a good pair to bring a tale of social injustice and fighting against the establishment to the screen.What makes the film heart wrenching that this migration took place up until the 1970s and some of the kids who ended up in Australia lived a life of systematic abuse and/or indentured labour until they became old enough. Many were suffering from mental scars as well as some physical ones.Although the film is shot in UK and Australia it is a low budget film, it might be slow going for some but the focus is on the actors to bring the tale alive. In that case Emily Watson, Hugo Weaving, David Wenham do a excellent job.It is a film that requires investment of your time and it is not a film that takes the easy way to cynically, manipulate your emotions that a lot of Hollywood films would do. It is a slow burner but the scenes near the end at Bindoon when the full horrors of what the kids have to face is revealed is gut wrenching.

AnnieLola Here is another example of past British governmental ideas of what was 'good' for disadvantaged or otherwise unprotected children. One recalls the heartless relocation of aboriginal children in Australia so vividly portrayed in "Rabbit-Proof Fence". After watching "Oranges and Sunshine" (and I didn't even see it from the beginning) I couldn't stop thinking of all those thousands upon thousands of helpless little boys and girls, deprived of any human rights whatsoever and doomed to cheerless and loveless childhoods. And then added to the flawed concept of this wholesale export of the underage needy is the fact that there are always predators who will pervert power over the weak into a free hand with abuse of every kind.Of course the greater part of the 'migrants' were profoundly damaged by the appalling treatment they received in a program officially perceived to be 'beneficial', at least in some quarters. Who was to benefit from the production of scarred adults, one has to wonder? Disposing of unwanted people by transporting them to far-flung colonies or Dominions was business as usual a couple of centuries ago; what's especially shocking is the discovery that this was occurring not in Early Georgian or Dickensian England, but only decades ago-- recently, uncomfortably recently. And this in a supposedly civilized nation! This film should have been made thirty years ago...

p-stepien Jim Loach, son of the revered Ken, traverses into the underbelly of British history with a subdued biopic of Margaret Humphreys (a tremendous as usual Emily Watson) and the insufficiently widespread story of the Home Children scheme, which transported up to 150 000 children from impoverished British families to orphanages across the globe. In 1987 social worker Humphreys specifically uncovered the involuntary child migration to the Australian colony, starting off in the mid-1900 century, but only ending in 1970. A state secret to which neither the Australian nor the British government wanted to confess to, brought many so-called orphans (promised the titular 'oranges and sunshine') into forced child labour, where they were subject to misuse, rape or even brought into contact with paedophile circuits. Of these the infamous Bindoon orphanage led by the Congregation of Christian Brothers, but built with the blood, sweat and tears of thousands of children, forced to mix cement in the scorching sun with their bare hands or carry stones the size of their upper body. These were the 'lost children of the Empire'.Jim Loach ventures down familiar family paths, instead of attempting to imprint his own signature. With this dimly lit feature he invokes a similarly grayish bleak mundanity, where even people wear drab clothing to underline the sense of dreary mistidings. Moments of light invariably and expectedly inhabit the more optimistic or revelatory moments, a somewhat expected filmmaker standard. Lacking a sense of individual style, borrowing from his great directorial father figure, isn't necessarily a problem. However Ken Loach usually ventures into projects with much less structure, which he can mold to his own liking, whereas the tragic historical backdrop of the Home Children scheme allows little leg-room and signalised a significant overreach on the part of the young director.With an overly TV-movie feel and an antiquated story delivery, Loach fails to instill a growing emotional punch, instead leaving large parts of the shocking reality with an underwhelming pull. That isn't to say that certain moments didn't hit with a vengeance, such as stories of abused Bindoon boys juxtaposed to Margaret struggling to live a normal family life. However for the most part the biopic struggles for dramatic coherence, overexposing certain aspects, while struggling to highlight others (especially regarding the hostile or disinterested reactions of government officials). With no real flow, "Oranges and Sunshine" provide one significant surprise: that such a striking, rage-inducing story brings about such a muted reaction in viewers, unlike the more familial, griping portrayal of the related subject matter of the Aboriginal Stolen Generation presented in "Rabbit Proof Fence". Unfortunately unearthing the ugly truth should really cause a more aggressive shock-induced response...