Saw two movies this weekend that have different but complementary takes on family connections.

Oranges and Sunshine chronicles the extraordinary story of how British children in state care were deported to Australia. Two birds with one stone: free up some space in Britain's crowded orphanages, and inject lots of malleable white children into Australia's population. Trouble is, the children were often lied to -- told their parents were dead, when in fact they weren't. The resultant feeling of abandonment, vulnerability, and lack of belonging marked many of them for life -- emotions that were only heightened by the awful conditions they experienced in many of the children's homes.

This is a very moving film. It is understated, in the sense that the pain of the people involved is allowed to emerge slowly -- we're not confronted with long testimony, just snippets. But we very clearly see the two-dimensional suffering: how did they cope with growing up unloved, and how did they cope with not knowing who they were? It's probably too late for most to fix the first, but they can at least come to terms with the second.

Into the Wild tells another extraordinary true story. Christopher McCandless is the first of two children of an affair -- born while their father was still married and had six other children somewhere else. The new marriage was not exactly happy either, and Christopher and his sister grew up around lots of domestic tension, even violence.

Can this explain, however, his decision to leave family, friends, career, and society, and go "into the wild"? Probably not. And in jobs and on journeys in various parts of America and Mexico, he met lots of decent people. He saw the possibility of a loving relationship in the hippy couple that befriends him. There was the opportunity for romance with the rail-thin guitar-player. There was the opportunity to gain an adoptive granddad. There were plenty of opportunities for work.

But he has to move on. To Alaska, to the wild, to untamed nature -- with no support except a few gifts from the would-be granddad, a bit of nature-lore (only half-learnt), and the providential discovery of an abandoned bus.

And it kills him. You keep thinking this is going to be a road-trip movie, and he will either go back, stronger and happier, or will find some way to live sustainably in the bush. Then suddenly you realize he's not going to make it out. He's going to die out there in his old bus.

Leaving his family always to grieve.

Very sobering. What you're driven by can kill you. Does that mean you shouldn't do it?

Unlike the deported children, he had family that he could at least try to connect with. But he needed something else, entirely different.

I thank God for my family. For all their inevitable mistakes, they loved me, and always did their best by me. I have been really, really lucky.