Blessed

Heartfelt and bracingly realistic in honouring the actual dramas that beset fractured contemporary families, Australian drama Blessed interweaves four vivid stories of alienated teens and their preoccupied mothers.

Adapting a stage piece created by four writers, Ana Kokkinos (Head On) carries off a dangerously simple formal device: in the first half of the film she shows events from the point of view of the kids. In the second half we see what the mothers see. Kokkinos’s imaginative identification with the denizens of the scruffy outer suburbs is as thorough as her ability to empathise either side of the generation gap. A fantastic cast blends young newcomers with some of Australia’s best known. This, like Samson & Delilah, by which it had the bad luck to be overshadowed, is social realism at its most visceral and clarifying. (Source: World Cinema Showcase 2010)

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