Virginia McKenna
Eve’s husband has been killed in Afghanistan. She takes her young son to a Suffolk beach house on the edge of the North Sea to grieve. But someone else is in the house grieving her loss from another war.
This hand drawn animated film, based on the award winning graphic novel by Raymond Briggs, is an intimate and affectionate depiction of the life and times of his parents, two ordinary Londoners living through extraordinary events.
Gwyneth Paltrow plays London publicist Helen, effortlessly sliding between parallel storylines that show what happens if she does or does not catch a train back to her apartment. Love. Romantic entanglements. Deception. Trust. Friendship. Comedy. All come into focus as the two stories shift back and forth, overlap and surprisingly converge.
On holiday with their mother in the Lake District in 1929 four children are allowed to sail over to the nearby island in their boat Swallow and set up camp for a few days. They soon realise this has been the territory of two other girls who sail the Amazon, and the scene is set for serious rivalry.
After defeating France and imprisoning Napoleon on Elba, ending two decades of war, Europe is shocked to find Napoleon has escaped and has caused the French Army to defect from the King back to him. The best of the British generals, the Duke of Wellington, beat Napolean’s best generals in Spain and Portugal, but now must beat Napoleon himself with an Anglo Allied army.
In 1941, The advancing Japanese army captures a lot of British territory very quickly. The men are sent off to labor camps, but they have no plan on what to do with the women and children of the British.
Born Free (1966) is an Open Road Films Ltd./Columbia Pictures feature film starring Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers as Joy and George Adamson, a real-life couple who raised an orphaned lion cub to adulthood, and released her into the wilds of Kenya.