Directed by: Jim Loach
Staring: Emma Watson, Clayton Watson, David Wenham and Greg Stone
A powerful, deeply moving account of a major social injustice. Watson plays Margaret Humphreys, a social worker who uncovers a post Second World War scandal of monstrous proportions concerning the deportation of 130,000 children from Britain to Australia, echoing the transportations there in the 19th Century.
Some children as young as four were deported and some falsely told that their parents were dead. Jim Loach, Ken Loach’s son, in his directorial debut, depicts Humphreys, as she meets ex deportee children who had been promised oranges and sunshine, and unearths the full horror of what happened to many of them in Australia. Something the authorities had been at pains to cover up,
and did so for decades. Watson’s is a luminous performance of undemonstrative decency.