Opal Dream

An opal town in Australia. Nine-year-old Kellyanne has two friends called Pobby and Dingan; nobody else can see them because they exist only in her head. One day Pobby and Dingan go missing. Kellyanne falls ill as though she had really lost them, and the matter becomes a problem for the family and then for the whole town. Adapting Ben Rice's short novel, Peter Cattaneo tells it through the eyes of her eleven-year-old brother, who does not believe her at first. The line between the imaginary and the real is argued over, but the film calls nobody wrong; the turning point is the town starting to take a child's invention seriously. A calm and honest family film that never slides into sentiment. The desert landscape and the opal mines give it its own tone.