Opal Dream

It's a lovely film that's very well written and acted. I'd never heard of it before and randomly picked it from the list on one of my streaming services. Some of the minor characters were sketchy and unbelievable but the main characters, especially the little girl were great. It is a very Australian film in every way, which is also a good thing.

The main theme of the imaginary friends reminded me a little bit, quite randomly, of Craig Gillespie's "Lars and the Real Girl". Unlike that Ryan Gosling flick however this film is much more emotional rather than comedy/emotional. I don't normally cry at films, very, very rarely, but this one got me close.

I saw this movie at the 2006 International Film Festival of Rotterdam.

Heartwarming family movie about imaginary friends.

The 9 year old daughter of a family in an opal mining town enjoys company of two imaginary friends. She becomes ill after something happens to them. The father is suspected of theft, making his household outcasts in the rough Australian mining community. The older brother has always felt embarrassed of his sister's behavior, but decides to help her anyway.

Movie manages to make the audience both laugh and care about its subject "imaginary friends". Very entertaining, Excellent performances from the child actors. Recommended.

9/10

Credits Trivia: The story is based on the book "Pobby and Dingan" (2000) by UK-based author Ben Rice. Pobby and Dingan are the names of the imaginary friends. I just happened to run into this little 100 page book a week after seeing the movie.

Why do I love this movie so much? I don't really know...I guess from a critics perspective it's not perfect, but for me it's one of those films I fall back on when I really couldn't be bothered with anything else and I need something to cheer up my day. It also manages to capture the rural side of Australia so well. You really feel the warm summer nights in Australia whilst watching this. Young lead Christian Byers was such a likeable kid as well. Where have all these smaller Aussie gems disappeared to? It seems no ones making them here anymore.

Some movies slip through the grinding gears of the industry. If you are lucky, you will stumble across this timeless, near-perfect glimpse of childhood innocence and its power to improve the world of adults.

Against the harsh backdrop of subsistence opal mining in the arid Aussie desert, a life dominated by the dreams of greedy men and their incessant paranoias and rivalries, a little girl nurtures the friendship of two imaginary beings, Pobby and Dingan. When Pobby and Dingan go missing on Boxing Day evening, the whole community is drawn into an imaginative, lilting drama.

How this film didn't win Oscars for it's two childhood stars is a reassuring confirmation that artistic independence and merit still exist, despite the egocentric shenanigans of the star-system and high-end production companies.

This is quite a good film about a sun-scorched prospector town and family members whose dreams and imaginary worlds drive each other nuts. It's deeper than the director's best-known film, The Full Monty, though the topic is similar: the struggles of working-class folks to stay closer to their dreams than they are to their failures. The depiction of the town dynamics seemed to me as flawless as the individual performances, and as someone who comes from a family with shall we say a non-standard member, I was impressed with the film's ability to produce a familiar emotional mix of exasperation, devotion, and desire for a truly imaginative cure for the main problem. The movie delivers on this last point. It would be wrong to see this as a chick flick, because as in The Full Monty the cast and crew are interested in men who try to figure out how to resolve conflicts and fix disasters without using anger and force, and who pretty much succeed. British and Commonwealth film is generally better than American at avoiding stereotypes of blue-collar masculinity and this is a particularly good and heart- warming example. The boy in the picture, who has to figure out what to do about his dad and his sister, is one of the great kids of recent film history.