Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on April 2012

Apparently, from the 1940s to the ‘70s, tens of thousands of children were taken from their “unfit” (i.e. unwed) mothers in Britain, told that their mothers had died, and were illegally shipped off to orphanages in Australia, often church-run, where they were beaten, raped, psychologically abused and subjected to slave labor. This well-written and deeply moving debut feature by Jim Loach, son of Ken, is the fact-based story of Margaret Humphreys, a British social worker who accidentally stumbled onto this monstrous scheme and its shocking cover-up in 1986. She launched a lifelong battle against the indifferent, sometimes outright hostile bureaucracies from both countries to help these emotionally scarred adults—dubbed by the press “the lost children of the empire”—find not just their mothers, but their very identities. Emily Watson couldn’t be better as Humphreys, and is ably supported by gut-wrenching performances from Hugo Weaving and David Wenham as two such abductees, the former emotionally crippled and shy, the latter oddly aggressive. Excellent cinematography by Denson Baker. Loach the younger has some very big, socially conscious shoes to fill, but this is a hell of a good start.