It tells the story of Romulus, his beautiful wife, Christina, and their struggle in the face of great adversity to bring up their son, Raimond. It is a story of impossible love that ultimately celebrates the unbreakable bond between father and son.
Raimond Gaita (1946 - ) comes of age in Frogmore, Victoria in the early 1960s. His parents are immigrants: his Romanian father farms; his German mother, Christina, estranged from Romulus, is in Melbourne. Romulus is near despair when she takes up with the brother of his best friend, who suggests he send for a new wife from back home. For Rai, poverty, bruises, and the mysterious ways of adults compete with his longing for a stable home and his own incipient puberty. Love and madness lie in the same bed. As an old woman tells Rai, "Sometimes what you reckon and what you get ain't the same thing."—<[email protected]>
Despite their hardships in life, Romulus (Bana) and his beautiful wife, Christina (Potente), struggle to raise their son, Raimond (Smit-McPhee), to the best of their abilities. As the deeply moral Romulus struggles to make up for the absence and neglect of the boy's depressive mother, father and son build an unbreakable bond that is only strengthened with the passing of time.
ROMULUS, MY FATHER is based on Raimond Gaita's critically acclaimed memoir of the same name. It tells the story of Romulus (Eric Bana), his beautiful wife, Christina (Franka Potenta), and their struggle in the face of great adversity to bring up their son, Raimond (Kodi Smit-McPhee).
It is the tale of a boy - Raimond, trying to balance a universe described by his deeply moral father, against the experience of heartbreaking absence and neglect from a depressive mother. It is, ultimately, a story of impossible love that celebrates the unbreakable bond between father and son. It involves issues dealing with mental illness during a time when there was little knowledge of treatments, when the treatments that did exist were archaic, struggle as immigrants in a new country, family and extended family and love for a father, all seen from the point of view of a young boy - Raimond.
