Sylvia

Sylvia, the memorable true story of a New Zealand woman who became an internationally-acclaimed writer and teacher, was chosen by The Village Voice as one of the ten best films of 1985.

Sylvia, New Zealand, 1985

Director: Michael Firth
Production co: Southern Light Pictures/Cinepro
Producers: Don Reynolds, Michael Firth
Screenplay: Michele Quill, Michael Firth, based on Teacher and I Passed This Way by Sylvia Ashton-Warner
Photography: Ian Paul
Editor: Michael Horton

With: Eleanor David (Sylvia Henderson), Tom Wilkinson (Keith Henderson), Nigel Terry (Aden Morris), Mary Regan (Opal Saunders), Martyn Sanderson (Inspector Gulland), Terence Cooper (Inspector Bletcher), David Letch (Inspector Scragg), Sarah Peirse (Vivian Wallop)

35mm, colour, 98 minutes, PG

Watch the Sylvia trailer (7.94MB; 2.08 minutes)

Sylvia Ashton-Warner, a New Zealand writer, had an appetite for art and life that demanded satisfaction. One of those throbbingly esthetical creatures, she yearned for the cultural oases of London or Paris, but it was in a New Zealand backwater, as a teacher of Maori children, that she found her vocation as a writer and educator. This Sylvia [not to be confused with Christine Jeff’s 2003 bioppic of Sylvia Plath] is a lovely and loving tribute to that fascinating woman. The film begins with excerpts of an interview with the old but ferociously strong minded Ashton-Warner, and then takes us through the year in which Sylvia, played by the British actress Eleanor David, comes with her schoolteacher husband to a remote rural outpost. This lush, humid, incredibly green, and appallingly primitive spot, captured by Firth in all its natural splendor, is the setting for an awakening in which the neurotic and gifted Sylvia and her pupil discover the world in themselves… If the fair-headed and translucently lovely Eleanor David is more glamorous that the rather forbidding woman we see in the prologue, she nevertheless conveys the complex contradictions of the seemingly fragile, intuitive, and sensual woman whom we meet in Ashton-Warner’s writings and the fiercely determined artist who couldn’t have been that easy to live with… This is a movie of eloquent dialogue and even more eloquent silences; of wonderful faces that tell whole worlds in a glance, a pause, a kiss in the rain. Of such are the glories of cinema made. — Molly Haskell, US Vogue, July 1985

Sylvia is both engrossing and enchanting. Its acting is fresh and unstereotyped; its mis-en-scene is inventive and complex. Its very progressive theme – educating the Maori of New Zealand in terms of their own culture rather than in terms of the assumptions of their European masters as to what is most “practical” for them – never reduces the characters to straw men and women… Director Peter [sic] Firth, who worked closely with Ashton-Warner before her demise, is clearly on Sylvia’s side, but he manages to make her more sympathetic by making her more fallibly human… The intensely interacting performances of the four principals is nothing short of breathtaking. — Andrew Sarris, Village Voice, 4 June 1985

Sylvia, the memorable true story of a New Zealand woman who overcame many obstacles to become an internationally-acclaimed writer and teacher, was chosen by The Village Voice as one of the ten best films of 1985.

Screenings: Sylvia screened on 9 & 10 April 2010 as part of a school holiday season; and on 15 August 2004 as part of a season selected by mediaplex manager Steve Russell.