Blessed

This film is fantastic. Beautifully crafted, brilliantly acted, comes together incredibly.

I was tremendously moved by this movie from Australia, and the audience at the London Film Festival were very appreciative of director Ana Kokkinos who attended to introduce the film and for a Q&A. Blessed is based on an Australian play called "Who's afraid of the working class" which was produced in 1999. So the project to make it cinematic has taken the best part of 10 years for Ana Kokkinos. Ana's focus in the film was towards the relationships between mothers and their children (or blessings), and stripped out anything from the play that didn't fit in that agenda.

The film is simply that, an examination of the bond between mother and child, with a strong backdrop of contemporary Melbourne. I think it was a challenge to try and strip the theatricality out, but that seems to have been pulled off really well (both with the structure of the film which is very cinematic and the focus on the close-up of the human face, which is a cornerstone of cinema). There are around five different stories here, which have some degree of connectivity, which avoids the choppiness you can get in a typical portmanteau film. Mostly we are seeing children on the streets of Melbourne, instead of in school, in some degree of confrontation or peril. There is a structure so that you can see the same story twice, once from the children's side and once from the adult's side.

I think the cast is cracking. Frances O'Connor as Rhonda if electric in this movie, like a force of nature, a flaming creature. She does some terrible things, they are sins of omission more than anything else (though they are still heinous). There is a scene in this movie where heavily pregnant Rhonda dances in a nightclub after a huge incident, whilst her social worker looks on in awe and disbelief. That's the attitude of the audience mirrored. Rhonda's alive with sexuality and agony throughout the whole movie, so apart from the way most people live in their ultra-sanitised lives where they've tried to remove everything animal. The social worker is a proxy for the middle class audience member, who is university educated and has erased their pagan side.

The level of confrontation in the movie is astonishing to anyone (like myself) who lives in a confrontation-phobic milieu. A police detective in a darkened interview room, full of frustration and rage, tells two truant girls how miserable they are and stupid, and how they've got no talent going for them and that they know nothing, and will never amount to anything.

Cezary Skubiszewik music is absolutely haunting, it's played over the opening scenes where we see all the children asleep in their beds. You know right then that you're in for a very special movie. It's a raging torrent of love and hatred and pure emotion that leaves you bewildered and touched by the dilemmas and hideous positions that the characters find themselves in.

I don't have any trouble in saying that this is the finest film I saw in a programme of at least 25 films, including the eventual winner of the festival, Jacques Audiard's Un prophète.

Ana Kokkinos believes in socking it to the audience, as she has done in "Head On" and The Book of Revelation". This movie, based on Andrew Bovell's play "Who's Afraid of the Working Class?" is a stark study of parent-child or rather mother-child relationships in conditions that are almost bound to make them dysfunctional, the working class north-western suburbs of Melbourne. It is neatly constructed with the events of a couple of days being seen Rashomon-like, first from the children's' viewpoints, and then from the parents'. The different strands of the story are artfully interweaved and easy to follow.

Teenager Daniel (Harrison Gilbertson), wrongly accused of stealing the mortgage money from his parents, Tanya (Deborra Lee Furness) and father Peter played by William McInnes, goes off to do some real burglary. Stacey (Eva Larazza), who must be 13 or so, and a bit simple, has left home to join her protective older brother Orton on the streets (they doss down in a charity clothing bin). Their mother Rhonda (Frances O'Connor) already has one other child in a foster home and is a textbook welfare case, pregnant again. Meanwhile two schoolgirls Katrina (Sophie Lowe) and Tricia (Ana Baboussoras) have wagged school to do a bit of shoplifting. Katrina's mother Bianca (Miranda Otto) is off indulging her pokies habit while Trisha's seamstress mother Gina (Victoria Haralabidou) has managed to drive her son Roo (Eamon Farren) on to the streets as well, where he is soon picked up by a porno film maker. One more child is involved, an adult James (Wayne Blair), who has issues about his relationship with his mother (Monica Maughan) as well.

I suppose it says something for the mothers that despite the neglect, they rush into action when something goes wrong, because deep down, they all care – the mothering instinct should not be underestimated. Not all of the stories are happily resolved but at least some relationships are restored.

Visually this film is very close-up and personal, and a challenge for the actors, who rise to it pretty well. Frances O'Connor is so good as the twitchy tattooed chain-smoking Rhonda I almost forgot it wasn't a documentary. Miranda Otto as Bianca shone also, and all the kids were good. Perhaps this film is light on entertainment value but it is absorbing as human interest – enthralling even. A much better film than "The Book of Revelation'.

We just returned from yet another brilliant and moving Australian film; it is the third of a trilogy of tough films that we have recently attended. Do not expect anything remotely comparable to something from Hollywood. As I have commented before, these films could not be made in Hollywood; the Americans could not stand the realism, the rawness or the lack of a cutesy ending. We were particularly struck by the realness of all that we saw; I do not know people living on the edge to the extent depicted in the film but I have encountered people such those on the screen so I believe that I can vouch for the accuracy of the portrayals. The film is divided between mothers and their kids. The first half of the movie examines the kids and the kind of life they are forging on their own, generally, because the bonds of motherly love have been broken irreparably in some cases and temporarily in others. In all cases the journey for the viewer is a road full of potholes. The seven children represent different methods of survival and the mothers, it could be argued, also represent different methods of survival but at an adult level. Men play a purely secondary role, if their presence could be called a role at all. To me the males represented the alpha and omega of maleness: at one time protector, at another life-slayer. However, the film first and foremost is about females and the roles they form to survive as best they can in a disturbing, malevolent world.

Ana Kokkinos' Blessed is a heartbreaking tale of the love between mothers and their children, and is one of the finest achievements of Australian cinema. The flawless screenplay follows a number of characters through a single day, deftly telling their stories from different points of view until we develop a full understanding of the day's events. Geoff Burton's stunning cinematography focuses on unexpected things – a pattern on a wall, a flash of fabric – and then moves in close to the characters, creating a rich visual texture. The music of Cezary Skubiszewski is one of the finest movie scores of recent years, gently enhancing the drama and the brilliant performances of the actors. The entire cast is superb, but I must make special mention of Frances O'Connor, who gives the performance of her life, and the splendid Monica Maughan, whose brief appearance in the film is truly unforgettable. Blessed represents a triumphant return to form for Kokkinos, after the disappointing Book of Revelation, proving that the astonishing Head On was no fluke. Her uncompromising, insightful, deeply humanist eye makes her one of the most exciting directors working today. Blessed is a deeply moving film that you will never forget, and deserves to be showered with awards.