PARADISE ROAD

Genre: Drama
Director: Bruce Beresford
Rated: M
Released: 1997
Country: AUS

Bruce Beresford’s film stars an amazing cast of women, including Academy Award winners Cate Blanchett and Frances McDormand. It’s 1942, and the British and Australian officers and their wives are celebrating the Allies’ upper hand in the war, from the comfort of colonial Singapore. Everything abruptly changes when the Japanese forces break through the Allied lines and surround the city of Singapore. Within two days, the city falls, and all the Westerners are evacuated on Army carriers. However, when the ship carrying women and children is bombed, the women find themselves afloat at sea. The survivors who float ashore in Malaysia are quickly captured by the Japanese Army, and held in an internment camp with Dutch female POWs. Within the first six months, one of the women is burned alive for secretly trading jewellery for medicine. IN the midst of sickness, exhaustion, starvation and abuse, the women try to keep their spirits up with their sense of humour, and through the power of music.