Home By Christmas (2010, NZ)

Gaylene Preston’s performed documentary Home By Christmas is a most unusual film. Heavily domestic, thoroughly engaging, and yet almost epic at the same time.

The film is about Preston’s father Ed’s experiences during World War II, and how his promise to be home by Christmas didn’t exactly come true. In his final years, Ed opened up about the war years, and Gaylene interviewed him and recorded the conversations. The film re-enacts these conversations, with Gaylene playing herself and Tony Barry playing Ed. This is intermixed with archival footage, as well as performed scenes of the events as they happened, with Martin Henderson playing young Ed opposite Chelsie Preston-Crayford as Ed’s wife Tui.

The stories Ed tells are great. Full of incident, fascinating, horrifying, and often very funny. Better still – and Gaylene obviously knew this given the approach she took to the material – is the voice in which it is told. Ed (as brought to life by Tony Barry) is a good storyteller with an easy manner, prone to smart understatement and a wry comment that sets off the narrative just so. It’s a very Kiwi mode, mixing the reserve you’d expect from a British voice with the verve you’d expect from an Aussie voice, hinting at deep emotion and intense experiences with gentle, simple gestures.

Watching it with Cal added an extra layer of interest, as some of Ed’s experiences crossed over with her own family history. For a while Cal was anticipating every twist and turn on screen because she’s been told the same events from a different soldier’s perspective. Hopefully she’ll blog about that herself!

Lovely film. Well worth a watch. Bound to turn up on NZ TV before too long, and currently doing the rounds in various festivals around the world.