Wartimes’ yarns touching

The Gaylene Preston-directed film Home by Christmas is a “touching memoir” based on interviews which Preston “conducted with her now-deceased father” and “not only re-creates those conversations and their evocation of wartime yarns, but delivers a subtle dramatisation of the home front’s less sensational events,” Russell Edwards writes in a review of the film for Variety. “In a shadowy minor role, Preston plays herself as she interviews her father, Ed [Australian Tony Barry], about his military life. The second narrative strand focuses on the filmmaker’s mother, Tui (Chelsie Preston-Crayford, the director’s daughter). Aided by superb art direction and a strong score by Preston’s sister, Jan, [Home by Christmas] communicates the complexity of home life with judicious minimalism.”