Oranges and Sunshine Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Oranges and Sunshine Blu-ray Movie Review

Orphans in the storm.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 25, 2012

The trauma of being orphaned and/or placed into foster care can ripple through generations, affecting not just those who suffered the initial shock of losing or being torn from their parents. I know from personal experience. My father was placed into foster care at a very young age when his mother died during childbirth and his father decided, probably wisely, that he didn’t have the wherewithal to raise six very young children (including a newborn baby). Four siblings were placed in a Manhattan foster care society, the eldest child stayed with the father, and the baby was put up for adoption. Some of these facts were not known to me or my sisters until well after my father died and we instigated some investigations, as during my father’s life it was absolutely verboten to even mention his childhood. On the one or two occasions I mustered up enough courage to even pose a tentative query, I was met with the kind of blistering stare that I rarely ever saw from my Dad, a look which told me in no uncertain terms “don’t go there”. There is of course no more alluring subject than something that’s forbidden (ask Adam and Eve about that vaunted apple), and so it’s no big surprise that I was fascinated by my father’s story and did everything I could to uncover what had happened to him. His brothers weren’t really of any help when they were alive, as they had been little more than toddlers when it all happened, though they of course were able to fill in a few details about my Grandparents and life in foster care in New York and its environs.

My sister, who lived in England for several years (where my father and a couple of his siblings had been born) , secretly went to the British repository of records, St. Catherine’s Hall (my father was still alive at this point and would have disowned her had he ever found out), and managed to track down quite a bit of information, including some data on our Grandparents and birth certificates for my father and his brothers as well as a couple of other children we never had even known about, both of whom had died either in infancy or young childhood. But after my Dad and his siblings had died, repeated searches, both online and in person, finally dredged up some of the most salient facts when I was finally able to track down the foster care society that had housed my father and Uncles and was able to get heavily redacted copies of the intake papers and case worker notes. They were absolutely heartbreaking and I’m not ashamed to admit I shed more than a few tears reading them. Armed with names of a few relatives and some dates I never had previously, a good friend who is an armchair genealogist managed to find out a whole slew of additional information, including rather incredibly the location of my Grandmother’s grave in Toronto, a discovery which came to light only last year.

The kind of ironic thing about all of this is on my mother’s side I have family trees going back to literally the 14th century, and generation after generation is minutely documented in a number of archives that have been passed down to all the relatives. And you know what? I couldn’t care less about that side of the family, probably because it’s all there in black and white. But the sheer mystery of not knowing that much about my father’s side of the family has been a nonstop source of fascination for me since my childhood, and it shows no signs of abating (when the 1940 censuses were recently made public, I spent hours trying, once again in vain, to track down my Grandfather and my eldest Uncle who left with my Grandfather so many years ago). This personal experience made the core issue of Oranges and Sunshine hit particularly close to home for me. The film is based on the real life story of Margaret Humphreys, a British social worker who quite by chance stumbled on a really disturbing scheme by a whole host of people that had been going on for literally centuries in one form or another, and which consisted of offloading orphans or foster children to both Australia and Canada, where quite frequently they were put into something akin to indentured servitude, forced to work in labor camps and deprived of any knowledge of their birth families.

As odd as it may sound considering the two films’ disparate subject matters, Oranges and Sunshine in its own way is very much like Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich. In both films, lone women more or less singlehandedly uncover years of malfeasance, despite the odds being rather considerably stacked against them, and also despite the fact that there are whole hierarchies of powerful interests aligned to keep the truth from coming out. As horrifying as the secrets of Erin Brockovich may have been, in a way Oranges and Sunshine is perhaps even more disturbing, if for no other reason than innocent children were the subjects of this drastically mismanaged “social engineering experiment.”

Oranges and Sunshine is an unapologetically heartbreaking film, and it treads a very fine line between effective emotionalism and what might be termed a certain amount of manipulation. If the film occasionally plays like a glossy Lifetime made for television outing, the level of performances and the fact that this is a “ripped from the headlines” true story elevates the proceedings immeasurably. Watson is reserved and understated, which actually only adds to the shock of the basic story. The main emotional content is carried here by Hugo Weaving, in a stellar performance as Jack, one of the children shipped to Australia with promises of “oranges and sunshine”, only to find out they had been misled and were now at the mercy of institutions that saw them as free labor. Later, even more shocking secrets are revealed from other “child migrants” (as the hapless kids were euphemistically called) who suffered outright sexual abuse from elements of the church to whom they had been entrusted.

Director Jim Loach and scenarist Rita Munro utilize an economy of means here which keeps the film moving, but which actually may deprive it, at least slightly, of some of its emotional power. Things move along so crisply here that it’s hard to assimilate the sheer shock that so many children (some 130,000, believe it or not) were simply stripped of their identities and shipped overseas with nary a second thought. (While some of these kids were indeed orphans, many were lied to and told their parents had died, when in fact they hadn’t. The parents in turn were told the children had been adopted by families better able to raise them, which was rarely the case.) The film may have had even more visceral impact had it allowed a bit more time for some of the back stories of the various “migrants”.

Margaret Humphreys has attained a level of renown in the United Kingdom that made her a social pariah to some (those in power who refused to admit their complicity in the migration schemes), but heroine to many more. Oranges and Sunshine is an uplifting, albeit incredibly disturbing, story of an unassuming woman who saw a frightful wrong and was absolutely determined to at least try to help set it right. She ultimately managed to get some measure of justice for many of these children (now obviously adults), reuniting them with their families, setting up a trust fund to compensate them for their misery, and perhaps most important, getting the British government to apologize for its serious lack of judgment.

Oranges and Sunshine Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Oranges and Sunshine is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of New Video and Cohen Media Group with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. This is a nicely filmic looking high definition presentation which offers natural fine grain, appealing color, and very pleasing fine detail. A lot of the film is intentionally dark, without huge variances in contrast, but that simply adds to the moodiness of the subject matter. The film is unusually scenic, with several gorgeous vistas in both England and Australia, all of which look great on the Blu-ray. There are some extremely minor artifacting issues with regard to some close cropped tweed jackets, which fail to resolve completely and have very minimal aliasing, but otherwise this is a very sharp and clear presentation that should easily please most videophiles.

Oranges and Sunshine Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

While Oranges and Sunshine boasts both a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix and an LPCM 2.0 stereo fold down, truth be told there's very little difference between the two mixes, mostly because the bulk of this film is so quiet and dialogue driven. The 5.1 mix does nicely open up in some notable sequences like a major beach scene between Weaving and Watson, and later a really tense showdown with some Priests in a huge cavernous eating hall, where the 5.1 mix adds some quite noticeable hall ambience that is otherwise lacking in the 2.0 mix. Fidelity is very strong in both of these audio options. One thing that would have helped Americans: subtitles. Several of the characters speak in extremely thick British accents, and it's extremely hard to understand what they're saying.

Oranges and Sunshine Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Interviews with the Cast and Crew (1080i; 25:35) feature Emily Watson, Hugo Weaving, David Wenham, Director Jim Loach and Writer Rita Munro.


• Making of Featurette (1080i; 13:28) features more interviews with the same people in the Interviews, providing more background on the project and Margaret Humphreys' story and quest to uncover the truth.


• Trailer (1080i; 2:02)

Oranges and Sunshine Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Oranges and Sunshine hit incredibly close to home for me, for all the reasons detailed above. Those of us who have lived with a relative traumatized by being orphaned and/or placed in foster homes know that it is more often than not a debilitating emotional calamity which in some ways, probably unintentionally, is passed down to subsequent generations. The film is an emotional minefield, which only makes Watson's quiet and controlled performance all the more effective. She and Weaving won the Australian version of the Oscar for this film (they really both deserved to be nominated stateside for their work), and their performances are heartfelt and extremely affecting. The film is perhaps a bit too rushed for its own good, but the story is amazing and deserves to be told. With solid video and audio, this release comes Highly recommended.