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By all accounts, New Zealand director Brad McGann's debut feature film, In My Father's Den (2004), is doing well, particularly overseas.
It has been nominated for six awards and won four of them. Not bad for a film with a budget of only NZ$7 million, which McGann himself adapted from Maurice Gee's novel of the same name.
In its essence, the story appears both simple and appealing; it is framed by an allegorical story read in voice-over by a girl, Celia, who becomes a central character in the film.
Internationally-famous war photojournalist and cosmopolitan sophisticate, Paul Prior (Matthew MacFadyen), returns to his home somewhere in Central Otago, New Zealand, for the funeral of his father. Paul's original intention was to stay only for a short time, but aided by a series of flashbacks in his father's den, or study, he decides to stay on. It is evident that all is not well between him and his brother Andrew (Colin Moy), apparently a church-going prig, who represses his wife Penny (Miranda Otto), and their glowering son Jonathan (Jimmy Keen.) This tension is reinforced when it transpires that Paul's excuse for missing the funeral - his plane was delayed - is a lie (he was in the pub), and also when he sleeps in for the lawyer's meeting to discuss his father's will. It is not long before his return causes skeletons to dance out of cupboards.
A first clue as to what might be lurking in the background comes when a flashback reveals his mother rejecting Paul while favouring Andrew, as children. A second appears when Paul discovers a photograph of a baby, along with newspaper cuttings about his own career, in an old atlas which his father gave him as a present. One of the hands holding the baby shows a distinctive padlock-bracelet, which he vaguely remembers. A series of flashbacks suggests a good relationship between Paul and his father, but shows that when Paul left home, Andrew pleaded with him to stay. About thirty-five minutes into the film, Paul goes out with his old girlfriend, Jackie (Jodie Rimmer), who has a teenage daughter, Celia, whom Paul has found using his father's old den as a personal writing bolthole. Further, Celia attends the...