Jim Loach, son of famed director Ken Loach, makes his feature-length debut with Oranges and Sunshine, a film starring Emily Watson, Hugo Weaving and David Wenham. Oranges and Sunshine made its world premiere in South Korea before playing at the Rome Film Festival. After a quick search online I’ve come across a pair of rave reviews and then one, not so much.
Richard Kuipers writing for Variety writes:
Auds may well be in tears just minutes into “Oranges and Sunshine,” a deeply moving study of emotionally scarred adults who were illegally deported as children to Australia from Britain in the 1940s and ’50s. Toplining a superb Emily Watson as Margaret Humphreys, the British social worker who brought the shameful secret to world attention in the late ’80s, this standout debut by British helmer Jim Loach, son of director Ken Loach, will make a strong claim for arthouse berths everywhere.
Additionally Darcy Paquet at Screen calls it “an emotional bombshell of a film that will leave audiences shaken.”
Over at The Hollywood Reporter Natasha Senjanovic wasn’t as impressed saying “a plodding script and muted staging strangely strip away the emotional punch of this true story.”
In the film Emily Watson plays Margaret Humphreys, a social worker battling the forced immigration of English children to Australia in the mid 20th century. The film is set to open in the UK and Australia in April and the trailer has just arrived. Have a look below. This could be an international flick we continue to talk about come awards season next year although it is still searching for an international distributor.
Secondly an international trailer for yet another feature directorial debut, Richard Ayoade’s Submarine, a film that’s been buzzed about for quite some time and stars Paddy Considine, Noah Taylor, Sally Hawkins, Craig Roberts and Yasmin Paige.
Ayoade is a British comic who wrote Submarine based on Joe Dunthorne’s novel telling the story of Oliver Tate (Roberts), a 15-year-old boy who must fight to save his mother from the advances of a mystic and simultaneously lure his eczema-strafed girlfriend in to the bedroom armed with only a vast vocabulary and near-total self-belief.
The Weinstein Co. has already picked this one up for release and while it will hit theaters in the UK in March there is still not yet a domestic release set. Check out the trailer below.
