Directed by Elissa Down
Writer/director Elissa Down drew on her own experiences growing up in an army family for her first feature film. She actually has two younger brothers with autism and describes growing up as ‘very eventful, crazy, funny and sometimes very sad’. In this distinctly Australian film, sixteen year old Thomas (Home and Away heartthrob Rhys Wakefield) moves into yet another house and is faced with the difficulty of fitting in at the local school. His mother Maggie (Toni Collette) is expecting another child and he helps care for his older brother Charlie (Luke Ford) who, like one of Down’s brothers, has autism and ADHD and is mute. Thomas’s father Simon (Erik Thompson) also has a questionable attachment to teddy bears.
The film is set nearly twenty years ago when bullying was a popular pastime and people didn’t know the difference between being autistic and being spastic. Although Charlie’s antics vary from entertaining to excruciating, the centre of the drama is actually Thomas who struggles to accept that his older brother is never going to change. At school, he becomes friends with Jackie (Western Australian model Gemma Ward) who is also searching for the missing ingredients in her life.
Wakefield and Ward give refreshingly natural performances as teenagers struggling to come to terms with adolescence while a shadow of unpredictability hangs over them. They cast off their former lives as a soap star and a supermodel to join Ford in enthusing life into this powerful story of family and survival. Having just won the award for the Best Feature Film at the 58th Berlin International Film Festival, the film is on track for the world-wide recognition it deserves.
