(Film) The Turning
Have a look at this interesting interview from today’s Melbourne International Film Festival Blessed premiere, in which Miranda Otto et al. discuss the film and its premise. Courtesy of The Age:
Miranda Otto says there is something primal about being a mother.
She tells the story of her mother running to the rescue when young Miranda was being hassled by some vile children. “She ran out and slapped one of them. It wasn’t a big slap,” she says.
Otto, with actors Frances O’Connor, Victoria Haralabidou and Deborra-lee Furness, was at the Sofitel Hotel yesterday morning talking about motherhood and love.
“If you’re depressed, it’s hard to give,” Otto says. Furness adds: “Some people just don’t have the tools to be good parents.”
They weren’t talking about their fellow actors but the characters they play in Blessed, a film that weaves together stories about mothers and children living in hard circumstances.
Otto’s character is lonely, lost and addicted to the pokies. She loses track of herself and of her kids, who wander the night. Furness plays a hard-working mother with a jobless, emotionally dehydrated husband (William McInnes) and an awareness that her family is more akin to the walking dead than a thriving entity. Haralabidou plays a young widow struggling to put food on the table.
It all sounds pretty grim, but the glue and light of the film is “the universality of motherhood”