Matters of Life and Death: Matching Jack, Little Sparrows and The Tree

Abstract

A mother of three grown daughters learns that her cancer has returned, so she gathers everyone together for one last Christmas at the family home in Perth; a woman is suddenly widowed when her husband suffers a heart attack, leaving her with four children to support on a rural property in south-east Queensland; a young mother, living a comfortable existence in inner-city Melbourne, is doubly devastated when she learns of her husband's infidelity shortly after her nine-year-old son is diagnosed with leukaemia. These plot synopses for, respectively, <i>Little Sparrows</i> (Yu-Hsiu Camille Chen, 2010), <i>The Tree</i> (Julie Bertuccelli, 2010) and <i>Matching Jack</i> (Nadia Tass, 2010) suggest all three films are maternal melodramas. Each film is distinctive, however, in its approach to subject matter that might otherwise be dismissed as sentimental or mawkish. With diverse production and funding bases ranging from micro-budget independent (<i>Little Sparrows</i>) and art-house co-production (<i>The Tree</i>) to mainstream studio distribution