“As an actor you are always looking for great stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things and learning to survive and reinvent themselves.” This is how Naomi Watts summarizes Glendyn Ivin’s Penguin Bloom, which premieres on the penultimate evening of 67th Taormina Film Festival at Teatro Greco .
The film tells the story of Samantha Bloom, played by Watts, who accidentally falls from a balcony during a holiday in Thailand. Bloom becomes paraplegic and is condemned to use a wheelchair. The woman and her whole family are saved by the arrival of Penguin, a magpie cub. Its presence and tenderness will slowly repair the hearts and relationships of the Bloom family.
Penguin Bloom was first a photographic book entitled Penguin Bloom: the little bird that saved our family, by Cameron Bloom, photographer and husband of Sam, and writer Bradley Trevor Greive. The Blooms themselves have been consultant behind the scenes for the movie and according to both Ivin and Watts, they’ve been “fundamental for the identification in the characters“.
Ivin claims she tried to describe reality through the eyes of a person unable to do what she was allowed before: “I think the beautiful thing about this film is that this is a story that can happen to anyone” , because it offers a key to re-emerge from the confrontation with the wall of impotence built by disability.
Penguin has many of predecessors. Roger Spottiswoode’s A Cat Named Bob in 2016, Mia and the White Lion by Gilles De Maistre in 2018, The Art of Racing in the Rain by Simon Curtis are just three examples highlighting the powerful link between animal and human being, strong enough to sometimes be able to save people even from themselves. Ivin points out that “Penguin Bloom it’s a film about the power of nature, because sometimes we can learn from nature.” Penguin helps the family that adopted him to reborn because it makes it possible for adults and children to meet the most primitive, natural and spontaneous parts of themselves.
Naomi Watts and Andrew Lincoln, the second one long-time protagonist of The Walking Dead, give us the exciting representation of a couple crumbled by a tragic event that once elaborating the mourning of the loss of what it was, has the strength and the ability to reborn in something new, because as Leonard Cohen wrote: “There is a crack in everything and that’s where the light comes in.“
