Australian author’s film adaptation of novel to be released worldwide

July 5, 2024

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The Australian Letter is a weekly newsletter from our bureau in Australia. This week’s issue is written by Julia Bergin, a reporter based in the Northern Territory.

On a film set in Berlin, Lily Brett wept as she watched the novel she had written about her father come to life in the cinema. Stephen Fry actually played her father; Lena Dunham played the character Mrs. Brett had based on herself.

“Stephen looked so much like my dad. It’s just phenomenal because Stephen is 6’5″ and my dad was 5’9″ at his peak,” she said.

The film, “Treasure,” opens in Melbourne in a few weeks. Based on Ms. Brett’s 1999 autobiographical novel “Too Many Men,” it tells the story of Edek, a Holocaust survivor, and Ruth, his daughter, as they travel to Poland, where Edek was born.

Ms. Brett says the film adaptation, directed by Julia von Heinz, is faithful to her book and its main characters: versions of her father, Max Brett, who died in 2018 just before his 102nd birthday, and of herself.

“When Lena did some of the weirder things that my character had to do, all I could think was, ‘Oh my God, did I do that?'” she groaned, recounting a scene in which her character sits down at the breakfast table and pulls out tray after tray of dehydrated food. “Oh no, I did that. Why did I do that?”

Mrs. Brett tells of her travels with Tupperware, including a delay at customs in Vienna.

Officials were so concerned about the shriveled orange sticks she had packed in clear plastic boxes that someone from her publishing house was called to the airport to explain that they were in fact dried carrots, sliced into ridiculously thin slices.

“I had five pounds of dried roots with me for a three-week tour,” she said incredulously. “The two customs men just looked at the woman from my publishing house and said almost simultaneously, ‘Does she think we don’t have roots in Vienna?’”

The film is full of similar moments that bring her story to life, says Ms. Brett, 77, the author of six novels, seven poetry collections and three essay collections.

From the beginning, Ms. Brett felt it wasn’t her film — “It was Julia’s film, it was the actors’ film” — but she considers herself “incredibly lucky” that she was included in round after round of scriptwriting and production, and that the film turned out as well as it did.

One thing is missing from the film version, however: the Australian connection.

After World War II, Mrs Brett’s parents left Poland and built a life for their family in the suburbs of Melbourne. Until she went to school, Mrs Brett truly believed she was living in a country called Paradise, because her father always called it Australia. As an adult, she moved to New York, and a six-month plan there turned into 35 years.

Mrs. Brett had been to Poland but had never been able to convince her father, an Auschwitz survivor, to go with her. But eventually he agreed to go.

The film’s opening scene takes place at Warsaw airport, where a stressed-out Ruth sternly tells her father to stand still and not run away.

Edek’s character seems at ease, speaking to everyone in Polish — just as he did when Ms. Brett traveled with him through Poland in the early 1990s.

“He talked to every taxi driver about their cars, which were usually Mercedes,” she said. Although he seemed comfortable right away, she could tell he was also deeply troubled by being back in Poland.

In the film, this manifests as a constant mission to reroute his daughter’s carefully planned itinerary. He insists on taxis instead of trains, takes her to a nondescript crumbling brick wall instead of the ruins she hopes to see, and waits in the car while she looks around his old factory and house alone. All the while, he tells everyone he meets that this is his daughter, a “famous journalist.”

Now, as she walks the red carpet for “Treasure” premieres in places like Berlin and New York, Ms. Brett said her father would have been “thrilled” (and a “hilarious nightmare”) if he had been there by her side.

Ms Brett said she had received messages from friends and family around the world saying the film made them feel as if they had spent an evening with her father.

“Dad would have loved it,” she said. “He believed that every novel I wrote was about him. Sometimes I had to remind him that he didn’t, like, marry a big-boobed blonde and open a meatball shop. He just said, ‘Ahhh, maybe.'”

Here are this week’s stories.