Citation

Hopgood F. Adaptation 2016; 9(1): 22-34.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016)

DOI

10.1093/adaptation/apu048

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Philosopher Raimond Gaita's acclaimed and much-loved memoir of his childhood in 1950s rural Victoria, Romulus, My Father (1998), was adapted for a feature film in 2007, starring Eric Bana and Franka Potente. Gaita worked closely with the film's director, Australian actor Richard Roxburgh, and scriptwriter, English poet Nick Drake, throughout the scripting process, and wrote an extended introduction to the published screenplay. While speaking highly of the film's production team and admiring the finished film in this introduction, Gaita's subsequent writing in After Romulus, a collection of essays published in 2011, reveals his unease with the film's portrayal of the character Christina, based on his mother who suffered from an undiagnosed mental illness and committed suicide at the age of 29. This article examines the dialogic relationship between the three texts of memoir, film, and essay and their attempts to empathetically imagine the life of Christine Gaita. © 2015 The Author. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

Language: en

Keywords

migration; mental illness; landscape; Australian cinema; memoir; Raimond Gaita; rites-of-passage films