Kutub

Jim Loach's sombre, painful film packs a hard punch; harder than you'd expect from the soft-focus poster. Emily Watson plays Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker who made it her mission in the 1980s to investigate the postwar scandal of child deportation. Children in care were literally transported -- like criminals from a bygone age -- to Australia, there to be kept in children's homes. Many were (falsely) told their parents were dead and often brutally abused in places similar to Ireland's Magdalene laundries, particularly in a place called Bindoon, run by the Christian Brothers in the remote bush south of Perth. In the burning sun, Bindoon looks like something akin to Castle Dracula. Loach's film shows how Humphreys's controversial intervention triggered something like the retrieval of a repressed collective memory. There are excellent performances from Watson, from Hugo Weaving as a gentle, damaged soul and David Wenham, a truculent ex-Bindoon boy who makes an unlikely common cause with Humphreys.