An Angel at My Table
An Angel at My Table is a 1990 biographical drama film directed by Jane Campion. The film is a dramatization of New Zealand author Janet Frame's three autobiographies, To the Is-Land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984), and The Envoy from Mirror City (1984), covering roughly the first 40 years of Frame's life, from her birth in 1924 to some time in the 1960s. Though originally produced as a television miniseries, it became a successful film that won awards at the New Zealand Film and Television awards, the Toronto International Film Festival, and second prize at the Venice Film Festival.
Plot
Janet Frame was born Janet Paterson Frame in a working class New Zealand family in August 1924, the third of five children (Myrtle and Bruddie were her older sister and brother respectively, Isabel and June were her younger sisters). Various scenes from her childhood are dramatized - traveling on a train with her family, being punished for stealing money from her father to buy gum and selling it at school, witnessing Bruddie suffer an epileptic seizure, visiting the school nurse, befriending a child named Poppy, who suffers from domestic abuse, writing a poem for class, discovering sexual intercourse, graduating from primary school, and reenacting scenes from a fantasy book with her family.