Dame Gaylene Preston will attend the newly-announced NZIFF screening of her masterwork, the fully-restored two-part feature Bread & Roses on Friday at the MTG Century Theatre in Napier from 10am.
When the film was originally released in 1993, Bill Gosden wrote:
“In a breathtakingly sustained act of imaginative identification, Gaylene Preston has created a tribute to her mother’s generation of New Zealand women. Her superb adaptation of Sonja Davies’ autobiography will ring resoundingly true—and disconcertingly truthful—for many New Zealanders. Much of its sharp eye for social history belongs to the women at its centre.
“An illegitimate child, the Davies of Preston’s film grew up with the middle class, but not of it, a watchful outsider looking for a safe haven. In Genevieve Picot’s lucid and moving performance, the young Davies’ pride in her own self-worth is never in doubt, but just how she is to live up to it is much less clear.
“Her outspoken recognition of the pressures wartime society places on women not only irritates her peers, it also fails to exempt her from the harsh experiences undergone by so many others. We see her fall in love with a GI, farewell him to war and disappear up country to bear an illegitimate child. We also witness the tuberculosis contracted while nursing, which almost killed her.
