News

This article originally appeared in If Magazine #141 (June-July 2011).

Cinematographer Denson Baker Acs was born in New Zealand but spent his childhood in Perth, Western Australia. Even though he was a child, he has distinct memories of the time, the atmosphere and the look of the city and its surroundings. It.s this prior knowledge and new research through studying .80s-era movies and photographs that helped Baker prepare for Oranges and Sunshine.

.It was always intended to be subtle and natural, not heavy-handed or obvious,. Baker tells If magazine from Bali. .We wanted to capture an atmosphere of a time and a place, not necessarily reference any films of the past..

Set in Perth, the filmmakers opted to shoot in Adelaide, which retains much of its past. Other parts of the film were shot in Nottingham, England . Margaret Humphreys. hometown. Director Jim Loach.s first choice was to shoot on 35mm...

Last year, production designer Melinda Doring won the If Award for Best Production Design for Australian-uk drama Oranges and Sunshine as well as an Aacta award for for her work on The Eye of the Storm. She tells fellow production designer John Rohde how she created the production design for Oranges and Sunshine while working on a tight budget.

John Rohde: How did you get involved with the film?

Melinda Doring: Oranges and Sunshine producer Emile Sherman (See Saw Films) suggested me to his UK co-producer Camilla Bray (Sixteen Films). I happened to be in the UK in the beginning of 2009 having just finished another UK -Australian co-production, The Boys Are Back, so I had the opportunity to meet with the director Jim Loach in London.

I loved Rona Munro.s script . it is based on the extraordinary autobiography Empty Cradles by Margaret Humphreys . so I found it easy...

Family film Red Dog solidified its position as this year.s biggest Australian film by cleaning up at last night.s Jameson If Awards Sydney. The film, which has made more than $21 million at the box office since opening in early-August, netted seven awards including Best Feature Film, Best Direction (Kriv Stenders) and Best Cinematography (Geoff Hall). It also won the Best Actor (Josh Lucas), Best Script (Daniel Taplitz) and Best Music (Cezary Skubiszewski) categories and of course, the Best Box Office Achievement. The flick only lost in two categories that it was nominated in (Best Editing and Best Production Design). Other big winners on the wet night in Sydney included Emily Watson, for her stunning portrayal of social worker Margaret Humphreys in Australian/UK...

Actress Emily Watson has certainly taken on a number of diverse roles in her career, from her Oscar-nominated turns in Breaking the Waves and Hilary and Jackie, to parts in Westerns (The Proposition), action films (Equilibrium), and adaptations (Red Dragon, the upcoming War Horse). She portrays the face of a remarkable yet under-told true story in her latest movie, Oranges and Sunshine, which will be released in New York and Los Angeles October 21.

Click to watch Exclusive: Emily Watson Interview!

Click to watch Exclusive: Margaret Humphreys and Jim Loach Interview!

Emily Watson portrays Margaret Humphreys (who wrote the book this drama is based on), a social worker who discovers a horrifying secret: children from broken homes were being deported en masse from the U.K. to Australia, after they were told their parents were dead. She wages a one-woman crusade to reunite these deportees, now adults living in Australia, with the families they had lost,...

Clips from Oranges and Sunshine, starring Emily Watson. The scripted by Rona Munro, opens October 28th via Cohen Media Group with a cast including Emily Watson, Hugo Weaving, David Wenham, Tara Morice, Lorraine Ashbourne, Clayton Watson, Aisling Loftus, Richard Dillane, Ruth Rickman and Russell Dykstra. TV helmer Jim Loach, known for "Bad Girls," Footballer's Wives" and "Hotel Babylon," makes his feature directorial debut on the project which opens October 28th. Oranges and Sunshine tells the story of Margaret Humphreys, a social worker from Nottingham, who uncovered one of the most significant social scandals in recent times: the forced migration of children from the United Kingdom. Almost singlehandedly, against overwhelming odds and with little regard for her own well-being, Margaret reunited thousands of families, brought authorities to account and worldwide attention to an extraordinary miscarriage of justice.

Clips from Oranges and Sunshine, starring Emily Watson. The scripted by Rona Munro, opens October 28th via Cohen Media Group with a cast including Emily Watson, Hugo Weaving, David Wenham, Tara Morice, Lorraine Ashbourne, Clayton Watson, Aisling Loftus, Richard Dillane, Ruth Rickman and Russell Dykstra. TV helmer Jim Loach, known for "Bad Girls," Footballer's Wives" and "Hotel Babylon," makes his feature directorial debut on the project which opens October 28th. Oranges and Sunshine tells the story of Margaret Humphreys, a social worker from Nottingham, who uncovered one of the most significant social scandals in recent times: the forced migration of children from the United Kingdom. Almost singlehandedly, against overwhelming odds and with little regard for her own well-being, Margaret reunited thousands of families, brought authorities to account and worldwide attention to an extraordinary miscarriage of justice.

She’s played opposite a wide and diverse range of leading men, from Ralph Fiennes and Daniel Day-Lewis to Geoffrey Rush and Adam Sandler, and is equally at home in wrenching dramas or comedies of manners. It’s perhaps a testament to her talents, though, that Emily Watson remains just to the left of indistinctive for most mainstream audiences — not unexceptional or anonymous, but unable to be immediately placed. In her latest film, Watson again gives voice to a remarkable yet “ordinary” woman, starring in “Oranges and Sunshine” as Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker who uncovers a decades-long program of forced deportation/immigration which sent tens of thousands of children from...

In the opening scene of Oranges and Sunshine, social worker Margaret Humphreys (Emily Watson) removes a baby from its mother’s care. She’s calm and methodical, talking to the parent and child in soothing but firm tones even as her eyes betray her devastation at carrying out this responsibility. Later, she vocalizes her ethical conflict—is she doing the right thing, or is she “oppressing the poor with middle-class values?”—and she spends the rest of the film reuniting children with their families instead with the same sympathetic professionalism....

Title: Oranges and Sunshine Director: Jim Loach Starring: Emily Watson, Hugo Weaving, David Wenham “Oranges and Sunshine” is re-affirming evidence that not every remarkable true story a remarkable film makes. Based on the book “Empty Cradles” by British social worker Margaret Humphreys, the movie tells the story of its crusading subject, who worked to uncover one of the most shocking government-sanctioned scandals of modern times — the forced deportation of many thousands of children from the United Kingdom to Australia. Both overall and scene-to-scene, though, ”Oranges and Sunshine” exudes a just-fine feeling of dutiful emotional string-pulling, and nothing more. It commits no great and cringe-worthy offenses, but neither does it ever really get...

The true story that inspired "Oranges & Sunshine," the directorial debut of Jim Loach, begs for dramatic interpretation. Set in 1986 Nottingham, it follows social worker Margaret Humphreys (Emily Watson) as she uncovers a hidden multi-decade history in which the United Kingdom deported children to Australia, where they were often raised in abusive labor conditions. Working from Rona Munro's understated screenplay, Loach gives the material a purposeful feel and avoids ...

The 20th century saw an immense number state-sponsored human tragedies and horrors, global mass murders and wars that splashed red across newspaper headlines and flashed across television screens. Many stories, however, went largely untold, lost to consciences numbed by all the pain. One of those secret injustices is now finally coming to international attention, decades after a hero helped bring closure to some of its victims.

In "Oranges And Sunshine," Emily Watson plays real-life British social worker Margaret Humphreys, who helped reunite thousands of splintered families after the were subjected to unspeakable evils on two sides of the world. Following World War II, the British government rounded up tens of thousands of children from financially distressed homes and sent them to Australia, telling them their parents had died and that they'd enjoy a life of plenty on the island.

It was quite the opposite; children were forced into labor, and...

In telling the story of a true-life unsung hero a filmmaker faces many pitfalls. How often have we seen well-intentioned movies become sanctimonious and lose their dramatic edge? No such accusations can be leveled at Jim Loach’s Oranges and Sunshine, an impressive film that documents an astonishing but little-known story. The wonderful Emily Watson plays Margaret Humphreys, whose book Empty Cradles documents her efforts, from 1986 onward, to trace the facts behind a mass deportation of “unwanted” children from England to— Australia beginning in the 1950s. This governmental program was kept under wraps for decades, and roundly denied when Humphreys…...

Oranges and Sunshine is Directed by Jim Loach and stars Emily Watson, Hugo Weaving and David Wenham.The film opens in theaters on October 21st, 2011. Synopsis Oranges and Sunshine tells the story of Margaret Humphreys, a social worker from Nottingham who uncovered one of the most significant social scandals of recent times: the deportation of thousands of children from the United Kingdom to Australia. Almost single-handedly, against overwhelming odds and with little regard for her own well-being, Margaret reunited thousands of families, brought authorities to account and drew worldwide attention to an extraordinary miscarriage of justice. Children as young as four had been told that their parents were dead, and been sent to children’s homes on the other side of the world. Many were subjected to appalling abuse. They were promised oranges and sunshine: they got hard labour and life in institutions.

Visit site for full article.

Oranges and Sunshine is a true-life drama that tells the story of Margaret Humphreys (played by Emily Watson), a social worker from Nottingham, England who uncovered one of the most significant social scandals of recent times. Until the late 1960's, successive UK governments had supported child migration, causing thousands of children to be deported from the UK to Australia. After learning that children as young as four had been told that their parents were dead before being sent to children’s homes on the other side of the world, where they were subjected to horrendous abuse, Margaret single-handedly set out to reunite thousands of families and bring worldwide attention to such an extraordinary miscarriage of justice, that only recently received formal apologies from both sides. At the film’s press day, actress Emily Watson talked about her shock at learning that this all happened within living memory, her reasons for...

Having the defining events of your life adapted into a major motion picture while you’re still alive (and working on those same issues) is weird, discombobulating stuff. Such is the case, though, for Nottingham social worker Margaret Humphreys, whose work in uncovering the forced deportation of thousands of British children is the basis for the new film “Oranges and Sunshine,” starring Emily Watson and directed by Jim Loach. Almost single-handedly, Humphreys brought authorities to account and drew worldwide attention to an extraordinary (and extraordinarily recent) miscarriage of justice, in which disadvantaged children as young as four years old were told that their parents were dead, and then sent to children’s...

Below first-time feature filmmaker Jim Loach (son of Ken Loach) shares an exclusive scene from "Oranges and Sunshine," his drama starring Emily Watson and Hugo Weaving. The film opens in limited release Friday, October 21. "Oranges and Sunshine" tells the story of Margaret Humphreys, a social worker from Nottingham, who uncovered one of the most significant social scandals in recent times: the organized deportation of children in care from the ...

Below first-time feature filmmaker Jim Loach (son of Ken Loach) shares an exclusive scene from "Oranges and Sunshine," his drama starring Emily Watson and Hugo Weaving. The film opens in limited release Friday, October 21. "Oranges and Sunshine" tells the story of Margaret Humphreys, a social worker from Nottingham, who uncovered one of the most significant social scandals in recent times: the organized deportation of children in care from the ...

See a second poster for Oranges and Sunshine, starring Hugo Weaving, Emily Watson and David Wenham. Jim Loach makes his feature directorial debut on the drama, helming from the script by Rona Munro (Almost Adult). Oranges and Sunshine tells the story of Margaret Humphreys, a social worker from Nottingham, who uncovered one of the most significant social scandals in recent times: the forced migration of children from the United Kingdom. Almost singlehandedly, against overwhelming odds and with little regard for her own well-being, Margaret reunited thousands of families, brought authorities to account and worldwide attention to an extraordinary miscarriage of justice. She discovered a secret...