Features

A New Hope: Oranges and Sunshine

Thousands of disadvantaged British children were promised oranges and sunshine when they were deported to Australia in the decades after WWII. A new co-production is now bringing attention to their once forgotten story.

The film chronicles the journey of Margaret Humphreys, a social worker who in 1986 brought public attention to a little-known Government program that saw up to 150,000 British children shipped to Australia (and other Commonwealth countries), often without the parents’ knowledge. Humphreys established the Child Migrants Trust to help them reclaim their identities and, when possible, reunite them with the family they didn’t know they had. The Trust has also allowed them to tell the stories of abuse they suffered as a result of the forced migration process.

The son of director Ken Loach, Jim, read Margaret Humphreys’ 1994 book Empty Cradles and contacted her in 2002 to discuss the possibility of a documentary. They stayed in touch and eventually, he realised that her personal journey could be made into a film.

A producer at Loach’s company Sixteen Films, Camilla Bray, joined Jim on this project, and then Rona Munro came on board as writer. Loach and Munro visited Perth in 2005 and met a number of former child migrants. It was this experience that confirmed the potential of the project.

“We were struck by their dignity, their tremendous sense of humour and a strength that confirmed to us that we wanted to make the film,” said Loach.

Around the same time, Bray met Australian producer Emile Sherman.

“It’s such a natural co-production that they needed to find an Australian to team up with, and it was in Cannes that Camilla mentioned the project to me,” said Sherman. “She then came to Australia to meet producers and get a vibe of the land. I just connected with the script and the project; it felt truthful and it was understated, but there was real emotion throughout the core of it. This was a story we wanted to be involved in, so we decided to team up.”

“I met Emile shortly after he met Camilla,” added Loach. “We sat at his office in Paddington and we started to talk. He brought huge strengths to our film; he’s very tenacious and doesn’t give up. Co-productions are being encouraged in the UK, because finance is a big challenge and it’s hard to raise the money solely in Britain. This project is a co-production from its very core; a very intrinsic British/Australian story and both countries have an ownership of it.”

Sherman is no stranger to co-productions, both official and unofficial. The Academy Award-winning The King’s Speech had a lot of Australian elements, but to make it work as a co-production some of the shoot would have had to take place here.

“We could’ve done that but it ended up not being worthwhile. As a producer you work out the most appropriate way to structure your film,” explained Sherman. “But with Oranges and Sunshine, it would’ve been impossible to do anything but a co-production.”

The Australian funding component was larger than its UK counterpart (which had money from BBC Films, Ingenious Media), with support from Screen Australia, Screen NSW and the SAFC. The Producer Offset was cash-flowed by See-Saw Films’ sister company Fulcrum Media Finance.

A Planned Contrast

Sherman put together a team of Australian heads of department, including DOP Denson Baker, editor Dany Cooper, production designer Melinda Doring, art director Tuesday Stone, set designer Glen W. Johson, costume designer Cappi Ireland and composer Lisa Gerrard, among many other local practitioners. The picture edit was done in the UK and the rest of the post-production in Australia.

“It’s a very even co-production but probably slightly more in Australia’s favour in terms of the shoot; we had about three weeks in Adelaide (doubling for 1980s Perth) and two in England. Jim, Rona and Emily Watson are British, so we really needed the rest of the creative team and actors to be Australian.”

With a shoot divided into two distinct parts, Loach consciously tried to avoid a final product suffering from ‘split personality’.

“When we were writing the script, and even in pre-production, I was very aware of the risk of having a split film, so we decided on the style we were going to shoot in, and how it would be consistent in both Australia and Britain, but it’s Margaret and her experience that really pulls everything together,” he said.

“We thought a lot about how to shoot the landscapes in Australia compared to the landscapes in Britain. There is a contrast between them, and we knew there would also be a big contrast in terms of the light and its qualities,” added Loach. “We were interested by the fact that former child migrants, although they had been born in Britain, when they came back they were at odds with the landscape. Margaret is also like a fish out of water when she is in Australia, and she’s always on the move, always discovering something until she arrives at this place hidden away in the outback, so it had elements of a road movie,” explained Loach.

The timing for Oranges and Sunshine couldn’t have been better; when the film was in production both the Australian and British Prime Minister offered a public apology to the child migrants.

“Through Margaret Humphries we knew there would be an apology at some point; she’d been campaigning for years for it to happen, but we didn’t expect it to be so soon,” said Sherman. “When you’re working as a producer you’re actually making a film… but this is real; it’s the story of thousands of people around the world who were affected by this child migrant scheme. The apology made us see the reality of what we were doing, and allowed people to move on as much as possible. The film had a nice synchronicity; we’ve become part of the process of bringing this issue, which many people are not aware of, to the public’s attention.”

Oranges and Sunshine was released in the UK to mostly positive reviews but a lukewarm box office result. It’s scheduled for a US release via the Cohen Media Group, and it was released in Australia by Icon on June 9.

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