At the Movies: Home By Christmas
“I was born into a world where there were three times,” says Gaylene Preston in the introduction of her new film, Home by Christmas: “There was before the war, after the war, and a secret place that nobody talked about—during the war.”
In this very personal recreation of her interviews with her father, who finally broke his silence on his war experiences, Preston has captured a love story, a piece of our history and created a deft, understated work of relevance to virtually every New Zealander.
Ed Preston was not only a typical man and father of his time, but a quintessential Kiwi male: taciturn, reserved, king of the understatement; staunch, resourceful. He and other service personnel came home to a post-WWII society lacking the resources to help them process their experiences. Some never spoke about the war. Some only spoke to other servicemen. The lucky ones returned to families and jobs that helped them reintegrate, one day at a time.
Preston’s film is a dramatic biography, a documentary with actors. In the interviews with her father (who died in 1992), veteran actor Tony Barry is Ed and Preston plays herself. Martin Henderson plays the young Ed in flashback, and his wife Tui is capably played by their real grand-daughter, actress Chelsie Preston Crayford. The acting is superb.
We see both parents’ war: Tui’s lonely struggle with a baby, the loss of a husband presumed dead, her involvement with another man; and Ed’s capture after three weeks in the Egyptian desert, internment as a prisoner of war, escape from a torpedoed ship and crossing of the Swiss border, and his return to rebuild his marriage and be father to a son he had never met.
The narration and dramatic sequences are interspersed with real historical footage and photographs, sourced from personal collections, the NZ Film Archive, Alexander Turnbull Library, National Army Museum, and Istituto Luce Film Archive in Italy.
The entire movie is appropriately understated but deeply affecting. Ed’s recollections are both revealing and frustrating. He answers his daughter’s questions but much is left unsaid. It’s the truth, but not the whole truth. Some of that is due to the man, some to his culture, some to the memories themselves. For decades after the war our society, families, and businesses were driven by these hard-working, emotionally stilted, unspeaking men. My father-in law, my grandfather, my schoolteacher. Their silences and legacies remain.
Preston, New Zealand’s first Filmmaker Laureate, recognised film’s power to give people a voice after working with mute patients in an English psychiatric hospital in 1972. Her drama therapy and improvisation with one group led to her first film and the realisation that, given such a voice, people ignored and abused gained importance and respect. Home By Christmas gives her father and his peers that voice and respect.
Enriched further by Alun Bollinger’s cinematography and a musical score by award-winning composer Jan Preston (Gaylene’s sister), it is poignant, skilfully made, and culturally socially valuable. It is also a human, loving memoir of and by a family that has shaped New Zealand film.
Maria Polglase
HOME BY CHRISTMAS (PG). The next screening at The Village Theatre will be held on Sunday 16 May at 4.30pm.
