Jean Watson's compassion is evident in this study of her work with orphans in Tamil Nadu.
Jean Watson's compassion is evident in this study of her work with orphans in Tamil Nadu.
A limited post-festival release should garner a deserved wider audience for this local documentary, which is as modest as its subject.
The title's Aunty is Jean Watson, now 80, whose 1965 book, Stand in the Rain, which drew on her liaison with Barry Crump, was the first of five well-regardednovels. But this film celebrates the work she began in 1989 when, after a visit to India as a tourist, she sold her Wellington house and established a boys' home (and later an equivalent for girls) in a small town in the country's southern Tamil Nadu state. The kids who call Jean "Aunty" are orphaned by parental death or neglect and the clean, well-run houses provided an austere and regimented base from which they pursue their studies and their dreams.
Their unshakeable cheerfulness is a cheering testament to the indomitability of the human spirit, just as Watson attests to our seldom-exercised capacity for compassion and generosity.
Smyth, who made the terrific Christchurch post-quake doco When A City Falls (not to be confused with the dreadful Hope and Wire) is an attentive chronicler of Watson's present and past and if the film occasionally wants for shape, it is nonetheless a touching portrait of an unassuming philanthropist.
