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Starting in the 1940s and continuing until as recently as 1967, hundreds of thousands of British children, some as young as 4 years old, were separated from poor families and single mothers and shipped to Australia, where in church institutions they were used as child labor and sometimes abused and raped. Their parents were assured they had been sent to "a loving family," and given no other information. This treatment was licensed by the social-work norms of the time.

The story was never made public. In 1986, in Nottingham, a social worker named Margaret Humphreys ( Emily Watson ) was told by an adult woman named Charlotte ( Federay Holmes ), "I want to know who I am." She had grown up being fed conflicting stories about her mother, many of them suggesting she was dead. She was in fact still alive, and Humphreys, in bringing them together, realized she had stumbled over an outrage of monstrous proportions.

Another woman, Nicky ( Lorraine Ashbourne ), is seeking her brother Jack (played by Hugo Weaving ), who was deported. Together they go to Australia and find him. He introduces Humphreys to others who came out from the U.K., apparently orphans, and they visit the remote Christian Brothers school where he was raised and abused. There is an electric, painful scene in which she approaches the brothers at tea and asks if any of them care to discuss the past. They stare silently at their cups and plates of cake, none stirring or meeting her eyes. Some of them are young. The older ones must have known this day was coming.

This is all true. When Margaret Humphreys went on TV in Australia to tell the story, she drew crowds of adults who knew they came from the U.K. but had never believed the stories they had been told. If their parents were dead, did they have brothers or sisters? Grandparents? Anyone who could tell them about themselves? As the scandal grows, Humphrey establishes an organization and raises a fund for it, and finally, in 2009, there were formal apologies by the British and Australian governments to the victims.

Emily Watson, a delicate English rose, has never seemed more sturdy than here. In this movie directed by Jim Loach (the son of filmmaker Ken), she doesn't play a fiery, charismatic heroine, but a quietly stubborn force of nature, who persists in a cause no one else cared to fight. Often, she and her helpers, especially Jack and another deportee, Len ( David Wenham ), are unfunded and seem to be drifting from one remote clue to another in the vast land. Sometimes she is made to feel in physical danger. She carries on.

One question is not addressed by the movie: Why were the children deported in the first place? Yes, we know the "reasons," but what were the motives? If hundreds of thousands of children without parents are arriving in Australia, why are there those eager to receive them? They must be fed, sheltered and educated for years. Where's the money? Are they needed for something as dismaying as to provide a reason for church institutions and jobs for clergy? Are they a growth industry? Does the government pay a subsidy that is welcomed? Are the children simply a pretext for the flow of funds?

The movie doesn't say. A crime was committed, it has been exposed, and presumably many family members have been reunited. We move on.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Oranges and Sunshine (2011)

Rated R for some strong language

100 minutes

Federay Holmes as Charlotte

Hugo Weaving as Jack

Lorraine Ashbourne as Nicky

Emily Watson as Margaret

David Wenham as Len

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Movie Review | 'Oranges and Sunshine'

Promised Paradise, Then Sent to Hell

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By Stephen Holden

• Oct. 20, 2011

In the quietly wrenching “Oranges and Sunshine” Emily Watson portrays Margaret Humphreys , an intrepid social worker from Nottingham, England, who exposed shameful national crimes. As recently as 1967, but especially in the 1940s and ’50s, as many as 130,000 children were removed from orphanages and group homes in Britain and deported to various locations in the Commonwealth, particularly western Australia. One deportee, now grown up, recalls being told at the age of 10 that he was being sent to a sunny paradise where he could pick oranges off trees.

Instead of lotus land, many found themselves virtually enslaved and forced into hard labor in institutions where they endured physical cruelty and sexual abuse. One of the worst was the remote Bindoon Boys Town, a hellish place presided over by the Catholic Christian Brothers, where many boys were raped.

The victims, who were told that their parents were dead, had no recourse but to endure until they were old enough to leave. Many were taken from parents, mainly unwed mothers temporarily deemed unfit. When they later searched for their offspring in orphanages, they were told their children had been placed for adoption in better homes.

If the film, adapted from Ms. Humphreys’s 1994 book, “Empty Cradles,” tells a true-life horror story, it refrains from exploiting that story for cheap shock. As directed by Jim Loach, the son of the great social realist filmmaker Ken Loach, it keeps its eye on the long view and maintains a steady, melancholic tone that conveys a resolute moral outrage.

There are two scenes in which Ms. Humphreys’s safety is threatened, but the hostility she encounters in her investigations isn’t overamplified. Nor is Ms. Watson’s Margaret a charismatic Joan of Arc leading a righteous brigade into the bowels of hell.

Margaret, who is assisted by her husband, Merv (Richard Dillane), is a fragile lone wolf who sacrifices the comforts of family life to pursue her work and eventually crumbles under the stress yet keeps on going. In Ms. Watson’s powerfully understated performance there are occasional speeches but no stentorian orations. Her cause is the only thing that matters. The awful fact of British and Australian complicity speaks for itself.

The scenes of reunions between long-separated siblings and between parents and their vanished children are all the more touching for their restraint. There is abundant emotion in the film, but it isn’t allowed to sidetrack Margaret’s quest for answers or to achieve whatever justice can be salvaged. In its quietude “Oranges and Sunshine” is the opposite of the recent film “The Whistleblower,” a devastating, high-pitched exposé of human trafficking involving United Nations workers in postwar Bosnia.

This film presents a chilling portrait of bureaucratic stonewalling and denial as Margaret presents her evidence to politicians who meet her accusations with indifference and skepticism, express only a vague regret and assume no responsibility. When she eventually faces a group of clergymen at Bindoon, she is met with absolute silence.

The story begins in 1986, when Margaret, a social worker for the Nottingham County Council, is approached by Charlotte (Federay Holmes), an Australian who pleads, “I want to find out who I am.” Charlotte recalls that when she was 4, she was placed alone on a boat bound for Australia after being told her mother had died. Margaret, digging through official records, finds Charlotte’s mother, and they eventually reunite.

Margaret travels to Perth with a British woman named Nicky (Lorraine Ashbourne) in search of her long-lost brother Jack (Hugo Weaving), whom she finds. In Australia, Margaret discovers a loosely knit group of deportees, now adults, who voice a plaintive longing to know who they really are. When Margaret publicizes her search in newspapers and on television, victims flock to her, but she also finds herself increasingly under attack. The film devotes special attention to Len (David Wenham), a high-strung former resident of Bindoon who persuades her to accompany him on a visit to the place.

Rona Munro’s screenplay for “Oranges and Sunshine” is unnecessarily flighty. As the story ricochets between Britain and Australia, the film often loses track of time and becomes fragmented as it struggles to integrate too many subplots. What holds it together is Ms. Watson’s calm, sturdy performance .

Early in her crusade Ms. Humphreys established the Child Migrants Trust. But it wasn’t until 2009, 23 years after she began her search, that the Australian government formally apologized for the forced deportation of child migrants; the British government followed suit in 2010.

“Oranges and Sunshine” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Some strong language.

ORANGES AND SUNSHINE

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Jim Loach; written by Rona Munro, based on the book “Empty Cradles” by Margaret Humphreys; director of photography, Denson Baker; edited by Dany Cooper; music by Lisa Gerrard; production design by Melinda Doring; costumes by Cappi Ireland; produced by Mr. Loach, Camilla Bray, Emile Sherman and Iain Canning; released by Cohen Media Group. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes.

WITH: Emily Watson (Margaret Humphreys), Hugo Weaving (Jack), Richard Dillane (Merv), Federay Holmes (Charlotte), Lorraine Ashbourne (Nicky) and David Wenham (Len).

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'Oranges And Sunshine,' But Both Of Them Lies

Jeannette Catsoulis

Covert Operations: A British social worker (Emily Watson) discovers a centuries-old shame: the forcible, secret deportation of children to Australia.

Oranges And Sunshine

• Director: Jim Loach
• Genre: Drama
• Running Time: 105 minutes

Rated R for some strong language

With: Hugo Weaving, Emily Watson and David Wenham

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'Ask Your Own Government'

Credit: From 'Oranges And Sunshine' - 'Ask Your Own Government'

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If anyone could be expected to stake out the angels' side of a social issue, it would be a son of Ken Loach , so it's no surprise that Jim Loach's first feature tackles one of the biggest social scandals of the past century. Oranges and Sunshine , based on the 1994 book Empty Cradles by Nottingham social worker Margaret Humphreys, deals with the fallout from the forced — and largely secret — migration of English children to Australia beginning in the 17th century and lasting, astonishingly, until the 1970s.

All in all, a staggering 130,000 children were shipped to the back of beyond, most of them working-class kids whose young, single mothers were told that they had been adopted by "better" families. (The children, many as young as 4, were told they were orphans.) But instead of the oranges and sunshine they were promised, many encountered horrific abuse and deprivation, mostly at the hands of youth-oriented Catholic ministries like the Christian Brothers.

Narrowing its focus to the adult survivors of those deported between the 1950s and the 1970s, the film unfolds in 1986 as Humphreys (a briskly determined Emily Watson) stumbles upon the largely undocumented scandal. Digging around in the British Library and in local records — Britain had no freedom of information act until 2000 — she unearths more and more shocking information, and more and more displaced adults. Soon she's jetting to Australia, interviewing men and women desperate to reconnect with the families and identities they've lost.

Earnest to a fault and disastrously cool-headed, Rona Munro's script presents a plodding procedural that dampens the story's inherent horror. But Munro also wrote the transfixing Ladybird, Ladybird for Loach Sr. — a movie that packs a powerful emotional wallop — so it seems likely that the fault lies with her director. Until now, the junior Loach has worked only in television, and it shows: Relying on businesslike framing and the minimum of camera movement, he downplays the drama that would have drawn us in. Efficiency is his watchword, and though Hugo Weaving and David Wenham both deliver affecting performances as men broken by their pasts, their presence only highlights the odd restraint of the movie around them.

It's all very stiff-upper-lip, when what the subject cries out for is a rant, at no point more intensely than when Humphreys reluctantly visits the site of so much of the abuse: the notorious Bindoon Boys Town. As she sits quietly sipping tea in front of the cassocked criminals (many of whom appear old enough to have been among the abusers), we're wishing she would throw the pot at them.

Margaret tells Jack (Hugo Weaving) that his parents may still be alive.

Abetted by Denson Baker's starkly distant photography and Watson's steel-fist-in-a-velvet-glove performance, Oranges and Sunshine spotlights a historical disgrace with a librarian's eye and an accountant's imagination. Even when her life is threatened, Humphreys keeps her cool (though her less-resolute hair begins to fall out), abandoning her saintly husband (Richard Dillane) and children in order to cure the inner child of strangers. Throughout, Loach's determination to avoid hysteria prevents us from caring too much, while his refusal to engage with possible political agendas — like some Australians' desire to top up the country's white population in the face of growing voting rights for native Aborigines — robs the story of much-needed layers.

But there's a much bigger problem. Oranges and Sunshine ends with former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's 2010 apology to the victims (Australia did the same a year earlier), but it wasn't politicians who used those children for sex and slavery — it was men of the cloth. And since the survivors' emotional pain derived not just from the deportation but from the brutal abuse that followed, by failing to put a face on the culprits (except in the most circumspect way), Loach robs his audience of much-needed closure.

"We built stations of the cross," says one traumatized survivor. "But who was crucified?" We'd all like to know the answer to that one.

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Oranges and Sunshine Reviews

The film is heartbreaking, enraging, and ultimately uplifting, thanks to Loach's economic direction and Rita Munro's focused screenplay. The magnitude of the insanity is sometimes hard to grasp.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Apr 21, 2022

Oranges & Sunshine is a well-made film, but its importance surpasses its ability to entertain.

Full Review | Apr 16, 2022

A work of controlled, retrospective outrage, telling the bizarre true story of how tens of thousands of young British lives were irrevocably ruined.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 3, 2020

A social issue drama whose fangs have been removed, Oranges and Sunshine has little to offer in comparison to past or recent cinematic genre efforts.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 27, 2019

Despite the difficulties the team faced when filming on opposite sides of the world, Oranges and Sunshine beats with one heart and develops its story coherently.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 28, 2019

It takes one of the most obscene scandals in 20th-century British politics and all but kills it off with its self-righteous stance, plodding script, mournful violins and clunky construction.

Full Review | Aug 30, 2018

Oranges and Sunshine is a powerful exploration and its subjects should be proud.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Oct 17, 2013

Jim Loach's feature debut presents the horrific injustice of forced child migration in a calm, measured manner.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Dec 18, 2011

'Sunshine' a burning indictment of child abuse.

Full Review | Original Score: B plus | Nov 4, 2011

The sincerity of feeling is unmistakable. So's the flat-footedness of the writing.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Nov 3, 2011

A chilling tale? Not when made into a maudlin, completely predictable, mainstream narrative movie by filmmaker Jim Loach.

Full Review | Nov 1, 2011

Earnest, heart-tugging, social problem drama.

Full Review | Oct 28, 2011

Yet another reality-based tale of a lone crusader who takes on past injustice, but a fairly good example of this overused genre.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Oct 28, 2011

Emily Watson, who always brings a special grace to the screen, gives a multilayered performance to the role of Margaret Humphreys, who not only puts her own family dynamic at risk but finds herself physically threatened.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 27, 2011

The story is a stunner, and the format, propelled by Watson's deepening investigation, gives the movie energy.

The result is a problem drama with more problem than drama.

Full Review | Oct 27, 2011

Emily Watson, a delicate English rose, has never seemed more sturdy than here.

The script occasionally employs a clumsy voiceover, but later the same technique works wonderfully, pairing the most dramatic plot points with its most emotional monologues.

Full Review | Oct 25, 2011

...a bit plodding overall, its heroine more perseverant than passionate.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Oct 25, 2011

A 'message movie' told in staid, blocky fashion, as if already edited down for a Hallmark-style TV presentation, and the lowest-common-denominator audience that medium occasionally implies.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Oct 23, 2011

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Oranges and sunshine — film review.

Prolific TV director Jim Loach (son of Ken Loach) has his heart in the right place for his feature debut “Sunshine and Oranges,” but a plodding script and muted staging strangely strip away the emotional punch of this true story on the forced immigration of English children to Australia in the mid 20th century.

By Natasha Senjanovic

Natasha Senjanovic

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Despite high-caliber movie actors Emily Watson and Hugo Weaving, and screenwriter Rona Munro (“Ladybird, Ladybird”), “Sunshine” is stretched thin for the big screen. The decidedly art-house film is better suited for television, and should do well in ancillary markets.

The film is based on the book “Empty Cradles” by British social worker Margaret Humphreys, which exposed the widespread practice of child deportation in 1986. Margaret (Watson) is approached by an Australian who is desperately searching for her true identity. Though Margaret initially disbelieves that the woman left England alone on a boat at the age of 4, after being told her mother had died – the story seems ludicrous – Margaret is intrigued.

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The woman sought information for years, to no avail, but in a five-minute sequence Margaret finds out that the woman’s mother is still alive and that something sinister is underfoot. This bureaucratic efficiency with which Loach propels story development marks the entire film, undermining the very drama at its core.

Once Margaret starts meeting more “orphans” in Australia, truly horrifying facts come to light. Many of the children had been separated from parents only temporarily deemed unfit to care for them. The children were then told their parents died; the parents that the children had been adopted by better families. Shipped to the land of “oranges and sunshine,” there the children were used as illegal labor and taken to institutions, like those run by the Christian Brothers, and often subjected to unthinkable physical and sexual abuse.

The social worker and her husband Merv (Richard Dillane) have since dedicated their lives to reuniting families, tirelessly petitioning both the Australian and U.K. governments for an official apology, which came only in 2009 and 2010, respectively.

“Oranges and Sunshine” is Margaret’s story, though she and the few other central characters are all depicted in broad strokes.

Margaret is so determined and good that Watson has little to do with her. And the Australian “orphans” (now adults) are treated with a self-righteousness that is grating. Even Len (David Wenham), the film’s only survivor who adamantly refuses to be pitied, is condescended to. “I don’t know about the man sitting in front of me,” Margaret tells him when he likens confessing one’s pain to whining, “but I’m sure I’d like to speak to the boy inside.” Weaving is brilliant in the nearly impossible role as the emotionally displaced Jack. 

Venue: Rome International Film Festival (Competition) Production companies: Sixteen Films, See-Saw Films, Screen Australia, BBC Films, Screen NSW Cast: Emily Watson, Hugo Weaving, David Wenham, Richard Dillane, Tara Morice, Tammy Wakefield Director: Jim Loach Screenwriter: Rona Munro Producers: Emile Sherman, Iain Canning, Camilla Bray Director of photography: Denson Baker Production designer: Melinda Doring Music: Lisa Gerrard Costume designer: Cappi Ireland Editor: Dany Cooper Sales: Icon Entertainment No rating, 103 minutes

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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.

By Richard Kuipers

Richard Kuipers

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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. World preemed at Pusan, pic is skedded for April 2011 release in Blighty and Down Under.

Co-produced by Loach Sr.’s Sixteen Films company and scripted by Rona Munro, who wrote “Ladybird, Ladybird,” pic has all the grit and integrity of a Ken Loach movie. What’s immediately clear is that Jim Loach, an experienced TV director, is no pale imitation of his highly respected father.

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Munro’s finely chiseled adaptation of Humphreys’ 1996 book “Empty Cradles” astutely avoids flashbacks of youngsters being herded onto boats. Set entirely in the 1980s, the movie opens with Margaret (Watson) more or less stumbling onto the life-changing story when confronted in Nottingham by Charlotte (Federay Holmes), an Australian woman who wants “to find out who I am.”

Supported by loving husband Merv (Richard Dillane), also a social worker, Margaret discovers Charlotte is one of thousands of British youngsters who were unlawfully removed from children’s homes and “unfit” (i.e., unwed) mothers and sent to Australia “for their own good.”

Undaunted by unhelpful British and Australian officials, Margaret reunites Charlotte with her mother. She then travels to Perth with Englishwoman Nicky (Lorraine Ashbourne) to meet the latter’s long-lost deportee brother, Jack (Hugo Weaving). Soon, she is swamped by enquiries from hundreds of Jacks and Charlottes, many of whom were told their parents were dead.

The heartbreaking stories Margaret hears will bring tears to most eyes. Without a hint of sensationalism or manipulation, deportees discuss the emptiness of never having felt a proper sense of identity. Others confess to feeling worthless after years of mental and physical abuse in orphanages, many of them church-run. One can practically see the frightened children in the eyes of these wounded adults.

The exception is Len (David Wenham), a brusque type who appears unscarred by his time at Bindoon, a remote Catholic orphanage where unspeakable acts were said to have taken place. Now a benefactor of the institution, he takes Margaret to his former home and exacts revenge with a quiet, beautifully controlled fury.

While touching on growing media interest in the explosive story and anonymous threats of physical harm to Margaret, the pic remains firmly focused on the terrible personal cost of political decisions kept hidden from public view.

Watson is perfect as the upright, compassionate and fiercely determined champion of victims’ rights. Weaving has rarely been better than as the empty Jack, and Wenham brings a sharp edge as the prickly Len. Thesping right down to the bit players is excellent.

In the best tradition of British social realism, Denson Baker’s largely handheld camera is steady and unobtrusive; Lisa Gerrard’s lovely score is discreetly applied. All other technical aspects are top-notch.

Australia-U.K.

• Production: An Icon Film Distribution (in Australia/U.K.) release of a Screen Australia, Little Gaddelsden presentation of a Sixteen Films/See-Saw Prods. production, in association with Fulcrum Media France, EM Media, South Australian Film Corp., Deluxe, Screen NSW, BBC Films. (International sales: Icon Entertainment, London.) Produced by Camilla Bray, Emile Sherman, Iain Canning. Executive producers, Rebecca O'Brien, Arnab Banerji. Directed by Jim Loach. Screenplay, Rona Munro, based on the book "Empty Cradles" by Margaret Humphreys.
• Crew: Camera (color), Denson Baker; editor, Dany Cooper; music, Lisa Gerrard; production designer, Linda Doring; art directors, Jane Levick, Tuesday Stone; costume designer, Cappi Ireland; sound (Dolby Digital), Gethin Creagh; visual effects supervisor, James Rogers; visual effects, Melissa Heagney; line producer, Joan Schneider; associate producer, Fiona Lanyon; assistant directors, Kieran Murray-Smith, Chris Webb; casting, Kahleen Crawford, Nikki Barrett. Reviewed at Pusan Film Festival (World Cinema), Oct. 8, 2010. (Also in Rome Film Festival -- competing.) Running time: 105 MIN.
• With: With: Emily Watson, David Wenham, Hugo Weaving, Richard Dillane, Lorraine Ashbourne, Kate Rutter, Greg Stone, Tara Morice, Stuart Wolfenden, Federay Holmes.

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Oranges and Sunshine Review

01 Apr 2011

105 minutes

Oranges and Sunshine

Between the late 19th century and 1970, 130,000 British children taken into care were told their parents were dead, and shipped to Australia, where many suffered abuse at the hands of their new custodians. In his first feature, Jim Loach (son of Ken) tells the true story of the British social worker (Emily Watson) who exposed the scandal, and continues to fight on behalf of its victims — even managing to reunite a few with their birth parents. In less sensitive hands, Oranges And Sunshine might have been the cinematic equivalent of misery-lit. Instead, it has a quiet power, but in its studious avoidance of melodrama, it’s almost too low key for its own good.

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Movie review: ‘Oranges and Sunshine’

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If ever there was a film that would have benefited from some ripped-from-the-headlines fervor, it is “Oranges and Sunshine,” starring Emily Watson, Hugo Weaving and David Wenham.

This too-quiet, too-sluggish film tells the nearly unfathomable true story of roughly 130,000 British children, wards of the state in the ‘40s and ‘50s, who were told their parents had died and that “oranges and sunshine” awaited them in Australia. Instead, they were shipped Down Under to draconian orphanages where they suffered sexual abuse and were forced into labor. Decades later, Nottingham social worker Margaret Humphreys (Watson) uncovered and exposed all those dirty little secrets.

It’s easy to understand why British director Jim Loach, son of eclectic director Ken (“The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” “Looking for Eric”), would want to handle such compelling material carefully. But sometimes the facts can get in the way of the drama, and that’s the central problem here. That sense of needing to be true to the record is reflected in an overwhelmed screenplay by Rona Munro, who wrote a 1994 docu-drama about another British miscarriage of justice, “Ladybird Ladybird,” directed by the elder Loach.

Things get off to a confusing start with Margaret striding into the projects and removing a baby from a mother’s arms. It happens that’s just all in a day’s work for her and has nothing to do with the forced migrations. If it was meant to give us context, to show that Margaret knows firsthand that sometimes a child must be removed from a home, it doesn’t do the trick.

Next, we’re dropped into a group-therapy session she apparently runs. Who the participants are or why they have gathered is never clear, except there is a woman who’s found a lost brother in Australia who will eventually factor in. The real story begins to emerge only when Margaret is approached after work by one of those now-grown children seeking her help in finding her roots, although how she found Margaret and why she thinks she might help her is yet another loose end.

Before Margaret, and the movie, get to the heart of things, there are trips to the library, hours scouring records and scattered moments with her husband and kids to establish she has a family, and thus her growing obsession, one that will eventually extend over 20-plus years, will come at a cost.

The film finally begins to gain traction as Margaret decamps with increasing frequency to Australia to see if she can reconnect these damaged adults with their families back in England. As their stories begin to emerge, horrific and heartbreaking, as reunions are arranged, you can’t help but be drawn in.

The push and pull of the film are both internal — from the deported — and external, from the various institutions unwilling to take responsibility for what happened. (It was only last year that the British prime minister issued a public apology; Australia’s came in 2009.)

Things are somewhat helped by Hugo Weaving (“The Matrix,” “Lord of the Rings” trilogy) and veteran Australian actor David Wenham (“Public Enemies,” “Lord of the Rings”). As Jack and Len, two of the deported youngsters now grown, their stories and their personalities become an amalgam of all the taken. Wenham, as the irascible Len, especially helps take some of the saintly shine off Margaret.

There is a washed-out look about the movie that makes it seem as if the filmmakers have stumbled across some old footage in a warehouse, and that certainly adds to its overall sense of melancholy. Watson, perhaps never more memorable than as the tortured young wife in 1996’s “Breaking the Waves,” seems emotionally drained from the start as well. The few moments of drama and outrage she is allowed bring her to vibrant life. Watching those rare scenes, it’s impossible not to wonder what sort of film this might have been had she and the others been given more license to feel.

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Former Los Angeles Times film critic Betsy Sharkey is an award-winning entertainment journalist and bestselling author. She left the newsroom in 2015. In addition to her critical essays and reviews of about 200 films a year for The Times, Sharkey’s weekly movie reviews appeared in newspapers nationally and internationally. Her books include collaborations with Oscar-winning actresses Faye Dunaway on “Looking for Gatsby” and Marlee Matlin on “I’ll Scream Later.” Sharkey holds a degree in journalism and a master’s in communications theory from Texas Christian University.

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Oranges and Sunshine | Review

Tally Me Banana

After working exclusively in television for the past decade, Jim Loach, the son of renowned director Ken Loach, makes his feature film debut with Oranges and Sunshine , a social issue drama based on the expose of social worker Margaret Humphreys, here portrayed by Emily Watson. While Loach doesn’t overdramatize the proceedings as one might predict a topic concerning children in an illegal migration scheme housed in poor conditions under religion based rule, his treatment does fall prey to the cliché of the martyred whistleblower and reeks unforgivably of a thorough sanitation of the subject matter. The details surrounding child abuse are as buttoned up as Emily Watson’s wardrobe.

Concerning the illegal deportation of thousands of children from the United Kingdom to Australia from the late 1950’s to 1970 under a child migrant policy called Home Children, Loach’s film begins in 1986 when social worker Humphreys picks up on the scandal. Single-handedly, with only the support from her understanding husband, Humphreys is able to work exclusively in Australia for a period of two years through her job, reuniting many adults with their families or real identities. Along the way, influential religious figures threaten her safety, government forces back home and abroad refuse to take responsibility for their actions and Humphreys herself begins to suffer from PTSD.

Humphreys develops close relationships with several people, including a man she reunites with his sister in England (Hugo Weaving) and an emotionally conflicted man (David Wenham) she manages to reunite with his mother. Culminating in an actual visit to one of the churches/homes the children were housed in, Humphreys acknowledges that there would be no great moment of catharsis for all these children and no great moment of recognition. And, in fact, the formal apologies of the Australian and the British Governments would not be issued until November 2009 and January 2010.

There’s a rather dour and plodding atmosphere to Loach’s film. While Watson gives a fine performance as a woman trying to do the right thing, we’re told time and time again that the children are the focus of this story. Yet what snippets of details we do get are completely sanitized. The camera has to cut away from one man in the asylum, unable to even utter the word rape. Another man, whose confession to Humphrey’s is told in a series of flashback snippets, whispers another cry about rape, so fleeting, you might have missed it. There’s only one detailed conversation of harsh living conditions and not many more moments of personal details belonging to the people that lived through these ordeals. Instead, the unmitigated hero of this story is supposed to be Margaret Humphrey’s, a woman who sacrifices her own family time to reunite thousands of others. Yes, Loach even gives us a scene where a woman at a Christmas celebration asks Humphrey’s young son what he got everyone for the holiday. “I gave you my mother,” he says.

A social issue drama whose fangs have been removed, Oranges and Sunshine has little to offer in comparison to past or recent cinematic genre efforts, like this year’s The Whistleblower , which may be more violent but doesn’t seem to cower in terror at the very real details it contends to highlight. But even the saccharine, happy-times title is an indication of the neutered quality Jim Loach was aiming for. In the transition from book to screen, Humphrey’s book, the much more aptly titled “Empty Cradles” became Oranges and Sunshine , something the children were promised once they reached Australia. ‘Steada treated, they got tricked. It’s the hard knock life.

Rating 2 stars

Los Angeles based Nicholas Bell is IONCINEMA.com's Chief Film Critic and covers film festivals such as Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and TIFF. He is part of the critic groups on Rotten Tomatoes, The Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA), the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and GALECA. His top 3 for 2021: France (Bruno Dumont), Passing (Rebecca Hall) and Nightmare Alley (Guillermo Del Toro). He was a jury member at the 2019 Cleveland International Film Festival.

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Oranges And Sunshine review

A forgotten generation remembered….

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The orange doesn’t fall far from the tree in the feature debut of Jim ‘son of Ken’ Loach, an earnest retelling of how the shameful deportation of thousands of children from Britain to its former colonies came to light in the ’80s. Loach Jr has inherited his father’s righteous indignation and measured style. If he’s also acquired Ken’s didactic bent, that’s an OK price to pay for a film that draws attention to a truly appalling injustice. Emily Watson plays Nottingham social worker Margaret Humphreys who, having been approached by a young Australian battling to be reunited with the mother from whom she was separated as a kid, realises her story is the tip of the iceberg. A little digging unearths a programme of relocation which saw many innocents suffer terrible abuse at the hands of guardians on the other side of the world, and many more grow up pining for relatives they’d cruelly been told had died or no longer wanted them. Faced with a wall of silence and some hostility, this Midlands Erin Brockovich sets about raiding archives, reuniting families and seeking redress that belatedly came, in 2009, with a humble mea culpa from the Aussie government. It’s a shocking saga to be sure. Yet it doesn’t quite translate as compelling drama, loach and scripter Rona Munro seeming cowed by the scale of the scandal and their terror of exploiting it. Their iffy solution to the former is to focus on just two representative test cases: a closed-off Hugo Weaving and a sceptical David Wenham. The latter, alas, simply stymies them, their reverence for the material resulting in a worthy tale so weighed down by the burden of history that it ends up flattened by it.

Neil Smith is a freelance film critic who has written for several publications, including Total Film. His bylines can be found at the BBC, Film 4 Independent, Uncut Magazine, SFX Magazine, Heat Magazine, Popcorn, and more. 

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Oranges and sunshine.

In a Nottingham support group, social worker Margaret Humphreys (Emily Watson, "Breaking the Waves") takes note when she hears the story of a big boat setting sail to Australia with only children as passengers for the second time. What she discovers is that the British Government sent hundreds of children to be adopted, breaking ties with birth parents and siblings to rationalize the benefits of "Oranges and Sunshine."

Laura's Review: C+

This feature film debut by Jim Loach, son of Ken, making the jump from television and taking up his father's interest in Britain's social issues, tells a little known (in the U.S. at least), jaw dropping story, in such a quiet low key manner that it fails to elicit the outrage which it should. The screenplay, adapted from Humphreys's book by Rona Munro ("Aimee & Jaguar") follows Humpreys's crusade beginning with that small, shared memory, continuing with journeys to Australia and ending up in Britain's court system. What happened in the 1950s and 60s shows the Colonialist mindset's arrogance and disregard for those they should be caring for. Children were shipped away, told their parents were dead while they still lived. Some even ended up in situations where they were treated as slave labor. Along the way to getting her country to rectify their wrongdoing ('Children of the Lost Empire!' screams one headline), Margaret began to reunite families, although some find only a gravestone to mark their lineage. Some of the more prominent reunions are anticlimactic, played with a reserve which may be realistic but is dramatically flat. Loach's film runs a long 136 minutes, yet he employs cinematic economy to bridge the distance between England and Australia. Cinematographer Denson Baker contrasts the small towns of England and London itself in their drizzly grey blues with the golden hues of down under, the vastness of different oceans used obviously with scenes of Humphreys meeting with one lost child, Jack (Hugo Weaving, "The Matrix"), on the beach. Watson is earnest in her quest, but like the film, she seems a bit washed out. Like movies about racial strife where a Caucasian is the hero, Humphreys is diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder for empathizing with her victims. "Oranges and Sunshine" is a bit plodding overall, its heroine more perseverant than passionate. Still, this is a story that deserves to be told and occasionally Loach really lets that sun shine on his subject.

Robin's Review: B-

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Oranges and Sunshine

• 4 out of 5 stars
• Recommended

Time Out says

Release details.

• Release date: Friday 1 April 2011
• Duration: 105 mins

Cast and crew

• Director: Jim Loach
• Screenwriter: Rona Munro
• Hugo Weaving
• David Wenham
• Emily Watson

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Ordinary Angels review – heartwarming rescue from the horrors of the US healthcare system

Alan Ritchson is impressive as a father who can’t pay his desperately sick child’s hospital fees, but the good-neighbour plot ignores a bigger question

I f you’re familiar with Alan Ritchson from his turn as Jack Reacher in the Amazon series based on the phenomenally popular Lee Child thrillers, get ready to see a different side of him in this weepy based on a true story. He’s once more playing a large, taciturn man (whether, per Reacher, his hands are still “as big as dinner plates” is not addressed), but here his problems cannot be solved by hitting things. Grieving the recent death of his wife, and drowning in debt from hospital bills, he’s devastated by the news that his youngest daughter may have only weeks or months to live, due to a condition related to that which claimed the life of her mother. Her only hope is yet more expensive treatment.

The revelation that a loud hairdresser with a drinking problem and zero sense of personal boundaries (played, effectively, by Hilary Swank at her most Dolly Parton), has read about his case in the local newspaper and decided to make the unfortunate family her personal recovery project is not immediately welcomed by the gruff widower. There’s an interesting moral tension at work here: the self-appointed saviour is legitimately helpful, raising thousands of dollars, but she will not take no for an answer, and the unsolicited intrusion crosses the line at several points. And yet … her interventions, taken as a whole, do vastly more good than harm.

Of course, the real villain of the piece is the American healthcare system; this is not a story that could be set in Europe. That a system exists where it is even possible to owe more than $400,000 to a hospital is the stuff of dystopian nightmares, but this film isn’t in the business of confronting the politics around the family’s predicament. Directed by Jon Gunn and written by Meg Tilly and Kelly Fremon Craig, the heartwarming spectacle of a maverick force for good rallying an entire community to save one unfortunate family makes for better drama than questioning why that family is in need of saving in the first place. Taken on its own terms as an old-fashioned character drama and showcase for Ritchson as a dramatic actor (he’s genuinely really good), it does the job it set out to do.

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