spinph Australian Author’s Novel-Turned-Film Goes Global

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

On a film set in Berlin, Lily Brett cried as she watched the novel she’d written about her father come to cinematic life. Stephen Fry was essentially playing her father; Lena Dunham played the character Ms. Brett had based on herself.

“Stephen looked so like my dad. Which is just phenomenal, because Stephen is 6-foot-5 and my father at his peak was 5-10,” she said.

The film, “Treasure,” premieres 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, on a journey to Poland, where Edek was born.

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

“When Lena did some of the weirder things that my character was required to do, all I could think of 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 container after container of dried food. “Oh no, I did do that. Why did I do that?”

Ms. Brett’s true tales of traveling Tupperware include a customs delay in Vienna.

Officials there were so concerned about the shriveled orange sticks she’d packed in clear plastic boxes that someone from her publishing company was summoned to the airport to explain that they were, in fact, dried carrots cut into absurdly thin slices.

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