An Angel at My Table

Similar to what happened with David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Jane Campion initially conceived the adaptation of the New Zealand novelist and poetess' three autobiographical volumes – To the Island, An Angel at My Table and The Envoy from Mirror City – as a television miniseries , but after production had already begun, the New Zealand Film Commission proposed to turn it into a biopic with theatrical distribution, apparently because they believed that it was a genre that would work well in cinema. The film tells, in a logic of small, interconnected and impressionist live paintings, the story of Janet (Kerry Fox), a writer who, at age 23, was wrongly diagnosed with schizophrenia and who went through a long ordeal of psychiatric treatments, having even been about to undergo a lobotomy at the time she released her first book (a collection of short stories), which was only avoided when it became known that she had won the Hubert Church Memorial Prize, one of the most important literary distinctions in her country.