An Angel at My Table (1990)

An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion, 1990) tells the story of famed New Zealand author Janet Frame. Frame was a brilliant child who, as a shy teen, was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and sent to a mental hospital where she was treated with electroshocks. The film, originally produced as a television mini-series, was presented in the Netherlands in 1991 by feminist film distributor Cinemien, which also presented a series of four postcards. This was a cooperation with the Dutch publisher De Geus in Breda which presented the Dutch translation of Janet Frame's autobiography.


Dutch postcard by De Geus / Hibiscus Films / Cinemien, 1991. Kerry Fox, Alexia Helogh, Karen Fergusson, and Janet Frame at the set of An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion, 1990).


Dutch postcard by De Geus / Hibiscus Films / Cinemien, 1991. Alexia Helogh in An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion, 1990).

Struggling for a place in the world

In the 1920s and 1930s, New Zealand's most famous author Janet Frame (1924-2004) grows up in a poor family with lots of brothers and sisters. Janet is a plump little girl, with an unruly mop of bright red hair. Already at an early age, she is different from the other kids. She is fascinated with books and stories after a friend Lends her a copy of Grimm's fairy tales. Despite financial hardships, her father manages to buy her a journal "for her writings".

By her late teens, she was no longer plump, but a rather crippling shyness had set in. She prefers to be by herself, where she can nurture her passion for creating stories. Janet gets an education as a teacher. After a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia, she stays at a mental institution for eight years and endures more than 200 electroshock treatments even though there was nothing really wrong with her except for shyness and depression.

Janet Frame is even scheduled for a partial lobotomy when news reaches her doctors that she wins a national literary award. During her hospitalisation her sister had published a book of Janet's short stories. She was almost immediately released under the premise that a talented author couldn't possibly need the treatment she had been receiving...

Jane Campion made this biographical drama in between her celebrated debut feature Sweetie (1989) and her Oscar-winning masterpiece The Piano (1993). Campion tells Frame's life story in three 50 minute interludes, based on three of her memoirs, 'To the Is-land' (1982), 'An Angel at My Table' (1984), and 'The Envoy from Mirror City' (1984). Campion made a very affecting and quietly powerful portrait of a gentle and genuinely humble woman. She keeps her main character always in the center, without losing that focus. Janet is excellently played in the different stages of her life by Alexia Helogh (child), Karen Fergusson (adolescent), and Kerry Fox (adult).

In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert gave the film 4 out of 4 stars, stating: "[The film] tells its story calmly and with great attention to human detail and, watching it, I found myself drawn in with a rare intensity. (....) Jane Campion's An Angel at My Table tells her [Janet Frame's] story in a way that I found strangely engrossing from beginning to end. This is not a hyped-up biopic or a soap opera, but simply the record of a life as lived, beginning in childhood with a talented, dreamy girl whose working-class parents loved her, and continuing to follow her as she was gradually shunted by society into a place that almost killed her."

An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion, 1990) was the first film from New Zealand to be screened at the Venice Film Festival, where it received multiple standing ovations. In addition to virtually sweeping the local New Zealand film awards, it also took home the prize for the best foreign film at the Independent Spirit Awards and the International Critics' Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. In Venice, the film was awarded the Grand Special Jury Prize despite evoking yells of protest that it did not win The Golden Lion.

An Angel at My Table not only established Jane Campion as an emerging director and launched the career of Kerry Fox, but it also introduced a broader audience to Janet Frame's writing. Frame has written some 20 novels, books of poetry, plays, and autobiographies.


Dutch postcard by De Geus / Hibiscus Films / Cinemien, 1991. Kerry Fox in An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion, 1990).


Dutch postcard by De Geus / Hibiscus Films / Cinemien, 1991. Kerry Fox in An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion, 1990).

Source: Roger Ebert (RogerEbert.Com), Wikipedia, and IMDb.