Once My Mother - Beginnings of the Film - 7 mins

View the 75 minute film at In this DVD extra, director Sophia Turkiewicz and producer Rod Freedman reflect on how they came to make the award winning documentary, ONCE MY MOTHER. Sophia began filming interviews with her mother while a student in 1976, then made short films and ’Silver City’ (1983), a feature film version of her mother’s life. Over 30 years later. she finally made Once My Mother, uncovering the true story of her mother’s epic journey from Poland to Russia, Persia, Africa and Australia. The film has won many international awards, including 6 in Poland. FILM SYNOPSIS When Australian filmmaker Sophia Turkiewicz was seven years old, her Polish mother, Helen, abandoned her in an Adelaide orphanage. Sophia never forgot this maternal act of betrayal. Now in middle age, as Sophia examines her troubled relationship with Helen, she discovers the story behind Helen’s miraculous wartime escape from a Siberian gulag, her subsequent survival agains