Exciting news – MATCHING JACK has won the awards for Best Directing (Nadia Tass) and Best Screnplay (Lynne Renew & David Parker) at the MIFF Awards in Milan. Congratulations to […]

In the hand of Australian director Nadia Tass, this Melbourne melodrama resists clichés and conventions.

It’s an emotional film. Bring tissues. Bring extras for the people sitting around you. Yet amidst the morbidity and bitterness there is hope, love, sacrifice, reluctant cooperation and enthusiastic generosity. And a timely reminder that children are worth fighting for and loving in good times as well as bad.

As a necessity we desensitise ourselves from so much that when a film like Matching Jack arrives, it reminds us that we are still human and able to feel something. In the case of this great Australian film it’s compassion to the nth degree.

In every movie you see there will be an incident that stretches credibility to breaking point (in airhead, violence-as-porn fantasies like ‘Salt’ they are twenty to the dozen) Remember when […]

While it is a bit of tear-jerker, and it certainly doesn’t retreat in some of the more confronting scenes, Tass has approached the topic with the respect and dignity it deserves and that is what makes the film so powerful.

She [Nadia Tass] does a superb job of bringing us a well rounded beautiful tale of family, love, dedication, sadness, hope and determination.

With considerable audience appeal thanks to the sensitive direction of Tass (The Big Steal), providing excellent performances from her cast, while keeping the emotional level high.

Tass is nothing if not persistent. The veteran Australian filmmaker, whose CV includes 1986’s Malcolm and 1990’s The Big Steal, spent years trying to sell movie studios, producers and various financiers on a script co-written by her husband, David Parker, about two families whose paths intertwine when their respective young sons are hospitalised with leukaemia.

Bingo! After an absence of over a decade, director Nadia Tass and creative partner David Parker (Malcolm, The Big Steal, the underrated 1997 charmer Amy) deliver a first-rate, uplifting, funny/happy/sad tearjerker about a kid dying of leukemia.