When she first saw the child actors that would be playing the young versions of Dilworth survivors, Mary Durham nearly burst into tears on set. “Seeing these children and their little bright shiny faces so full of promise really hit home how young they were,” she says. “The world is all a big adventure in front of them, but instead of being an adventure, it turned into this absolutely horrendous nightmare and there was just no escape.”
Durham (Beyond the Darklands, The Women of Pike River) is a co-director of TVNZ’s docudrama The Lost Boys of Dilworth – she directed the documentary portion, while Peter Burger (The Gone, Outrageous Fortune) directed the dramatised scenes. Telling the stories of Dilworth survivors – some for the first time publicly – Durham says she had previously been aware that “something terrible had happened” at the boys school, but it hadn’t fully realised the enormity of the abuse until the project.
