Created by Robert Connolly and based on the book by multi award-winning author Tim Winton, The Turning is a unique cinema event featuring seventeen talented Australian directors from diverse artistic disciplines, who each create a chapter of the hauntingly beautiful novel.
The linking and overlapping stories explore the extraordinary turning points in ordinary people’s lives in a stunning portrait of a small coastal community.
As characters face second thoughts and regret, relationships irretrievably alter, resolves are made or broken, and lives change direction forever. This watershed film reinterprets and re-imagines the work for the screen.
Robert Connolly says “Tim Winton’s The Turning is a unique book amongst Tim’s wonderfully diverse body of work, a collection of individual stories that combine in a rich and complex portrait of a familiar and confronting world.
“It is an innovative adrenalin rush of a read, a cryptic jigsaw puzzle of a book that continues to reveal its heart-breaking secrets with each read.”
On The Turning, author Tim Winton says “Ten years ago I found myself falling into a nest of stories about the smalltown milieu of my adolescence.”
“I didn’t plan that project; it took shape by accident, by months and years of trial and error during which it seemed that each new story was snagged into another, reaching ahead, aside, behind into other pieces as they arrived.”
“It was like trying to drag a bike from a dark and crowded shed. I set out with the notion I was extracting the one set of wheels and handlebars, but I was soon contending with a snarl of greasy machines rattling way back into the shadows, each snagged into the next.”
“Somehow it was all or none. So I had to let go any notion that this would be a book of discrete stories, and that letting go took some time. I can’t really account for how all this happened, but it was a happy if bewildering experience.”
“The book found a wide readership here and abroad and continues to prosper in ways I don’t pretend to understand.”
Presented as part of the Official Selection at the 2013 Melbourne International Film Festival, The Turning features an all-star cast including Cate Blanchett, Rose Byrne, Miranda Otto, Richard Roxburgh, Hugo Weaving, Susie Porter, Robyn Nevin, and Dan Wyllie.
The Turning screens nationally from 26 September 2013. For more information, visit: www.theturningmovie.com.au for details.
