Margaret Thomson

Filmes

The Troubled Mind
Director
A dramatised documentary featuring Adrienne Corri, made to recruit women for training as nurses in ‘mental hospitals.’ It takes a deeply humane and stylistically vivid approach. Some of the treatments shown would be considered unsuitable today.
Child's Play
Writer
A science-fiction film about children who manage to split the atom and thereby create a new form of popcorn.
Child's Play
Director
A science-fiction film about children who manage to split the atom and thereby create a new form of popcorn.
A Family Affair
Director
Part of BFI collection "Your Children and You."
Children Growing Up with Other People
Director
Part of BFI collection "Your Children and You."
Making a Compost Heap
Director
This is a half-reel film telling its audience how to use inedible parts of plants from their garden to make compost. It seems pretty basic stuff, but there were a lot of city boys working in what were called Victory Gardens in the United States. Letting them know how easy it was to make compost for a better truck garden meant a lot of fresh food on the home front.
Hedging
Director
Made by the Realist Film Unit for the Ministry of Agriculture, the film details how to make sturdy, long-lasting hedges.
Understanding Aggression
Director
This eye-opening drama-doc, set in a psychiatric hospital, was used to train student nurses and tells us much about evolving attitudes to mental illness. A progressive training tool in its time, it still feels sincere but also sensible and silly in about equal measure. The clinical need to clarify vies with the cinematic need to dramatise, reaching a feverishly literal extreme in scenes of a paranoid schizophrenic being pursued by a giant eye…