A Woman of Experience

The famous novelist Kaoru Mitarai drives drunk and hits an old woman. Her son Ryuhei, who is an obscure novelist,threatens Kaoru to let him publish her manuscript under his name. Kaoru gets mad at first but soon begins to enjoy it. She has been losing the will to write and he energizes her. 'Song of Good Old Future' wins the prize and is on the bestseller list. Ryuhei becomes famous and has an affair with young attractive editor Yuriko. The relationship between Kaoru and Ryuhei gradually changes and turns to be tragic.

"Promising actress Anjanette Abayari shows her dramatic flair as she tackles two different roles in this back-to-back telecine special. Conservative and radical, despondent and playful, real and imagined. Two different roles. Two distinctive approaches. One daring actress. In 'MURANG ISIP' AJ plays a teacher who quits her job to concentrate on the details of her upcoming wedding. But a student's failed suicide attempt postpones her wedding and makes her realize what her priorities are. In 'DREAM GIRL' Anjanette plays a character in a novel transformed into flesh but only the novel's author can hear and see her. As the writer escapes more and more from the world into hers, her personality evolves so well that everything becomes too real for comfort. Where does fantasy end and reality begin?"

Jack Daingerfield has been going a fast pace and has lost his entire fortune. His creditors hold a meeting and after a stormy interview he agrees to give them all he has. One of the creditors offers to arrange a marriage between him and a rich girl, Mary Delmar. Jack weakly consents after he has been introduced to the young woman. Lord Lytton, a jealous rival, breaks the romance, and Daingerfield, in despair, accepts a commission from a moving picture company to make a film of lion hunting in Africa. When he reaches the lion country he manages to get several wonderful pictures of the lions, but one of his friends is attacked by a wounded lion, and before they can kill the enraged beast the man is mangled beyond recognition. Jack moves to a safer place to take another film of a lion that is breaking from cover. At this moment he is shot in the back by the two assassins, Lord Lytton and one of his (Jack's) creditors. Bill Tuttle, a bright young American who was the cameraman for the expedition, succeeds in getting the two villains on his film, and when the triumphant hunters return to England the villains are exposed in their true colors by the indisputable evidence. Daingerfield finally wins the girl.

Maggie, a professional women in her 30s, is in the sleeping compartment of an overnight train to Sydney. Maggie is a workaholic who drowns her loneliness in a busy world. Unable to relax, she pulls out her laptop. But on this night, Maggie's lifestyle of extreme order and isolation is disrupted when a 14-year-old Albanian girl silently demands her seat and Maggie is forced to travel backwards. The next morning as Maggie anxiously prepares to meet her estranged mother, Ramona, she is disturbed to realize that the girl, Azra, is following her. To Ramona's incredulity, Maggie invites the stranger home and there Azra begins to reveal a deep secret. Ramona's world of quiet suburbia, where novelty letterboxes front the neat yards, is an unlikely scene for a clash of language, culture and family turmoil. But as Azra reveals she is a refugee from Kosovo, the fragile walls of suburban familiarity begin to crack. Her family shattered by war, all Azra has to hold on to is a hand-made postcard of the Opera House, which her mother sent from a detention center in Australia. Azra's past is glimpsed in a nightmarish memory, which is echoed by the childhood experience that Ramona later relays to her own daughter. These fragments within the story add a personally poetic layer to the underlying politics of exile and belonging. Both emotionally troubled, Maggie and Ramona struggle to deal with the stranger. Ramona is highly critical of Maggie, who in turn resents her mother's overbearing ways. Their relationship is turned on its head, when Azra'search leads to a surprising and ultimately moving discovery. In the current climate, where the issue of asylum seekers has polarized opinion, So Close To Home is a remarkable depiction of the ironies and challenges involved in the idea of strangers. What begins as a story of boundaries is soon transformed into an exploration of the bonds of family and in particular, motherhood.