After taking home the Audience Award for Best Documentary at last year’s Adelaide Film Festival and playing sold out sessions to a very warm reception at the Sydney Film Festival, Once My Mother is Australian director Sophia Turkiewicz’s redemptive documentary about her mother’s life.
Helen’s life was riddled with misfortune. As a motherless child in Eastern Europe she was placed with uncaring relatives. She escaped, but then the Second World War began. Deported to a Siberian gulag, she survived starvation rations and a forced march of thousands of kilometres. Finally, this irrepressible woman finds happiness in a Rhodesian internment camp, but fate is about to play another trick. Helen’s daughter, director Sophia Turkiewicz, tells her mother’s miraculous story with archival and personal footage. Significantly, it is also Sophia’s story, with the bond between mother and daughter examined in all its strength and fragility.
For your chance to win a double pass to Once My Mother, simply let us know your favourite exploration of the mother and child relationship on film or doco, and why. Email filmink@filmink.com.au with your answer. Please include your full name and postal address.http://www.filmink.com.au/giveaways/923/Closing date: July 23, 2014
Australian Competitions Club
