A limited post-festival release should garner a deserved wider audience for this local documentary, which is as modest as its subject.
The title's Aunty is Jean Watson, now 80, whose 1965 book, Stand in the Rain, which drew on her liaison with Barry Crump, was the first of five well-regarded novels. But this film celebrates the work she began in 1989 when, after a visit to India as a tourist, she sold her Wellington house and established a boys' home (and later an equivalent for girls) in a small town in the country's southern Tamil Nadu state. The kids who call Jean "Aunty" are orphaned by parental death or neglect and the clean, well-run houses provided an austere and regimented base from which they pursue their studies and their dreams.
Their unshakeable cheerfulness is a cheering testament to the indomitability of the human spirit, just as Watson attests to our seldom-exercised capacity for compassion and generosity.
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