An Angel at My Table

I don't like movies about children made in Britain, Australia or New Zealand if they're set in any time period before the 1980's because you just know there's going to be at least one scene of a child being caned or otherwise abused. I don't know what's wrong with those people. But I needed to turn on a movie for my mother so it was An Angel at My Table (New Zealand, 1990) directed by Jane Campion, about writer Janet Frame. She has an awful childhood like every other child in New Zealand. She's misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and spends years in a mental hospital as she blossoms as a writer.

The scene I remembered from the review on Siskel & Ebert was where she's nervously hanging around with some bohemians in Australia. She tells them she writes. They ask her if she's published anything (none of them have) and she awkwardly stuns them by telling them she's published two or three books of short stories.

But it took a while to get to that point and if you didn't know who Janet Frame was, you didn't know about her eventual triumph.