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Last year, production designer Melinda Doring won the If Award for Best Production Design for Australian-uk drama Oranges and Sunshine as well as an Aacta award for for her work on The Eye of the Storm. She tells fellow production designer John Rohde how she created the production design for Oranges and Sunshine while working on a tight budget.

John Rohde: How did you get involved with the film?

Melinda Doring: Oranges and Sunshine producer Emile Sherman (See Saw Films) suggested me to his UK co-producer Camilla Bray (Sixteen Films). I happened to be in the UK in the beginning of 2009 having just finished another UK -Australian co-production, The Boys Are Back, so I had the opportunity to meet with the director Jim Loach in London.

I loved Rona Munro.s script . it is based on the extraordinary autobiography Empty Cradles by Margaret Humphreys . so I found it easy...

Thousands of disadvantaged British children were promised oranges and sunshine when they were deported to Australia in the decades after WWII. A new co-production is now bringing attention to their once forgotten story.

The film chronicles the journey of Margaret Humphreys, a social worker who in 1986 brought public attention to a little-known Government program that saw up to 150,000 British children shipped to Australia (and other Commonwealth countries), often without the parents’ knowledge. Humphreys established the Child Migrants Trust to help them reclaim their identities and, when possible, reunite them with the family they didn’t know they had. The Trust has also allowed them to tell the stories of abuse they suffered as a result of the forced migration process.

The son of director Ken Loach, Jim, read Margaret Humphreys’ 1994 book Empty Cradles and contacted her in 2002 to discuss the possibility of a documentary. They stayed in touch and eventually,...