Termini Station is a love story between a mother and daughter struggling to free themselves from their bitter family past. Dewhurst plays an alcoholic with a passion for opera, and Follows plays a hard-edged, part-time hustler, caught in the trap of a small Canadian town.
| CAST AND CREW | |
|---|---|
| Director | Allan King |
| Writer | Colleen Murphy |
| Production Company | Saturday Plays Limited |
| Producer | Allan King |
| Executive Producers | Don Haig, Douglas Leiterman |
| Associate Producers | Nicolas Gray and John Board |
| Cinematographer | Brian R.R. Hebb C.S.C |
| Editor | Gordon McClellan |
| Production Designer | Lillian Sarafinchan |
| Music | Mychael Danna |
| Principal Cast | Colleen Dewhurst, Megan Follows, Gordon Clapp, Debra McGrath, Leon Pownall, Elliott Smith, Norma Dell'Agnese, Hannah Lee |
| Festival | |
|---|---|
| 1989 | Toronto Int'l Film Festival |
| 1989 | Cinefest, Sudbury |
| 1989 | Vancouver Int'l Film Festival |
| 1990 | Montreal World Film Festival |
| 1990 | 26th Chicago International Film Festival |
| 1990 | † 5 Nominations: 11th Genie Awards, including Best Motion Picture, Best Actress in a leading role for both Colleen Dewhurst and Megan Follows and Best Original Screenplay |
By Colleen Dewhurst who portrays Molly Dushane
When I first started reading [Termini Station] I didn't really know what I was dealing with. I supposed the first thing I was aware of was that unlike many film scripts, I was looking at very interesting writing. But I wasn't quite sure where it was going - whether it was about people on the poverty level, people locked into a life that they would never be able to escape.
And then as I went through it, I realized that it was very interesting that a writer had taken a feeling that I think we all have right now in North America - a depressive thought that there's no way out of where we are and put it into a context without a lot of flag-waving, speech-making or philosophizing. And then out of that singled out two quite incongruous heroines: one who would seem destined for a life just getting by while knowing within herself that there is some other life for her, and another who had never really succeeded in any way and who would lose herself in alcohol to forget her failures. This dream we have of being free of the things that hold us back, this dream we have of freedom is in ourselves. These two women, walking the last mile together, as I call it, discover that in terms of real compassion, real understanding, no matter where you are, there is a way out. It is always dangerous to make a decision, but is better than allowing yourself to believe that you can't.
"Darkly amusing, Murphy's screenplay is at once pointed in its psychological accuracy and flaky in a quasi-documentary way that gives the action an off-kilter spontaneity...the film's triumphs lie in the precision of its insights into familial wounds, and resentments that can explode like dynamite."
- Stephen Holden, The New York Times, 31 May 1991
They’re not supposed to make movies like this anymore...
movies with tough, funny, sad, exhilarating screenplays about plucky loners and passionate losers, movies that test the viewer’s emotions every step of the way.
Colleen Murphy's beautifully written script...compassionately told.
[...] Termini Station is a feast of fabulous acting. Colleen Dewhurst, always a master at expressing volcanic emotion, is infuriating and heartrending as the regal, ragged Molly. Megan Follows is intense and enigmatic as Micheline, a girl with a barbed-wire heart.
- Chicago Reader, 19 October 1990.
"An account of the devastating impact wrought upon people's psychological and emotional well-being by desperate socio-economic circumstances. The film concerns the recovery from hopelessness of a bitter teenage prostitute named Micheline (Megan Follows). Daughter of an alcoholic and a suicide, Micheline's harsh life helps her see through the family hypocrisy and the hypocrisy of propriety and pull herself out of her personal degradation. Colleen Dewhurst as the mother gives an outstanding performance, with all the generousness of emotional subtlety we have come to expect through her career, as a woman whose hope was never gone, only buried."
1990 Chicago International Film Festival
Megan Follows and Colleen Dewhurst