“Oh my god –

you bombed the hospital I was born in?”

 

How unlikely could it be?

 

 

Two generations after WW2,

a young Australian film-maker

and an aging American Air-force bomber

meet by chance amidst the post-hurricane

devastation of New Orleans

and find they share an uncanny past.

 

 

He has fading memories of the

horrors of war torn Rabaul -

of the friendships lost,

and the Australian war hero who saved his life

in a mid-air battle with the Japanese…

 

and of bombing the small Papua New Guinean

town of Kokopo and its hospital,

where a young girl was born to a local

vulcanologist some decades on.

 

 

She tries to remember the post war paradise

she then grew up in with her family,

before a tragedy

at the edge of the crater buried it all.

 

The allied bombing of WW2 and three catastrophic

eruptions have now devastated the

peaceful Pacific town of Rabaul

and neighbouring Kokopo on PNG’s volcanic rim.

 

 

But some memories refuse to be buried.

 

The war is over, but for both the film-maker

and the fighter pilot,

life is double-exposed

with the haunting memories that live on.

 

 

As the volcanoe threatens to bury the remnants

of their past yet again,

they journey back

to confront the battlefields

of their own history.

 

 

A story of war.

 

A story of family.

 

 

A story of the uncanny meetings and unlikely

connections that unite us all.

 

 

 

 

A new Wendy Dent Film

in production

 

 

to be filmed on location on

New Orleans USA,

Sydney Australia,

Rabaul and Kokopo, New Britain Island, PNG

 

 

© Wendy Dent 2006