Bread and Roses

Gaylene Preston's superb adaptation of Sonja Davies’ autobiography will ring resoundingly true – and disconcertingly truthful – for many New Zealanders

Bread and Roses, New Zealand, 1993

Director: Gaylene Preston
Producer: Robin Laing
Executive producer: Dorothee Pinfold
Screenplay: Graeme Tetley, Gaylene Preston, based on the autobiography by Sonja Davies
Photography: Allen Guilford
Camera operators: Alun Bollinger, Leon Narbey
Editor: Paul Sutorius
Production designer: Rick Kofoed
Music: John Charles

With: Genevieve Picot (Sonja), Mick Rose (Charlie), Donna Akersten (Mrs Mackersey), Raymond Hawthorne (Mr Mackersey), Tina Regtien (Con), Erik Thomson (Red), Theresa Healy (Peggy)

16mm, 200 minutes, PG

1994 NZ Film & TV Awards:
Television: Best female performance in a dramatic role Genevieve Picot; Best supporting performance in a dramatic role Mick Rose; best design Rick Kofoed.
Film: Best female performance in a dramatic role Genevieve Picot

“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 woman 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. Davies’ consequent journey towards political activism gives the film its direction, but it’s the epic of common experience she embodies that gives it such substance. Audiences may be startled into delighted reacquaintance with a thousand nuances of an earlier New Zealand, but there’s nothing conservative or nostalgic about this view of our past. A long time in the gestation, this is a richly developed, highly detailed and beautifully realised piece of work ...” — Bill Gosden, New Zealand Film Festival, 1993

“... Despite its monumental length, Bread and Roses moves swiftly, and with hardly a stumble: 10 minutes in, childhood, first love and an entire marriage are all out of the way. They’ve got the pacing about right, because Sonja Davie’s life has hardly begun. Summarising what happens in the rest of this homegrown masterpiece, for those who don’t yet know the basic outline, is to ruin many important moments. Suffice to say that the decades of Davies’s life chronicled in this made-for-television production are hardly short on tragedy or drama… As a film, Bread and Roses achieves that rare feat of stepping back into the past, yet staying very much alive; it overflows with memorable impressions of our country and our people – especially the women.Towering above it all is the wonderful performance of Genevieve Picot, previously best known for her part as the manipulative housekeeper in the Australian movie Proof. It is to the credit of her and scriptwriters Graeme Tetley and Gaylene Preston that Bread and Roses has the courage to present its heroic major character in an uncomplimentary light on occasion. Her strength of will and sensitivity to injustice are there for all to see; but at times, especially early on, an arrogance and selfishness come with it. Why lengthy made-for-TV productions like Gaylene Preston’s Bread and Roses and Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table have caused such a sensation on the big screen has mystified many in the industry, including even their directors. But perhaps the answer is a simple one. Freed from any cinematic obligations to make it spectacular or sensational, and limited by their budgets regardless, these film makers have concentrated all their energies on the human face of their story. Cinema viewers, freed from the homely distractions of living rooms and commercials, are thus that much freer to appreciate the richness of what such talented film makers, and equally strong scripts, can really offer.” — Ian Pryor, Tbe Evening Post, 15 September 1993

Screenings: Bread and Roses screened on 16 August 2006, as part of the Friends of the Film Archive's selection