'Audrey's Children' director Ami Canaan Mann beautifully crafts the story of 'the Mother of Neuroblastoma'

Yahoo

29-03-2025

Award-winning director and writer Ami Canaan Mann has beautifully crafted a representation of the life of Dr. Audrey Evans, directing the film Audrey's Children. Starring Natalie Dormer, Jimmi Simpson and Clancy Brown, the story takes us to 1969 Philadelphia as Dr. Evans (Dormer), a pediatric oncologist, revolutionized treatment for children with neuroblastoma, becoming known as "the Mother of Neuroblastoma."
The film was written by Julia Fisher Farbman, who knew Dr. Evans since she was a little girl, and Mann and the cast were able to meet the doctor, who died just two weeks before filming wrapped for Audrey's Children in 2022. She was 97 years old.
Audrey's Children begins with Dr. Evans at the world-renowned Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where she became the hospital's first female chief of pediatric oncology. Dr. Evans comes to the department with new treatment ideas, initially too far fetched for her colleagues to understand, who are then quick to dismiss her. But Dr. Evans is determined to find the best treatment options for her young patients, while also providing care with kindness and compassion.
Among her few allies is Dr. Dan D'Angio (Simpson), who would become her future husband.
In terms of what interested Mann in taking on this project, there was one scene in particular that made her want to be involved.
"The scene that really got me was, there's a scene on the roof where Dr. Evans talks to a little girl and tries to help her conceive of her own passing, and I thought, my God, that is not a position that any adult wants to be in, to be helping a child conceive of how they will no longer be on Earth," Mann told Yahoo Canada. "And here's a woman that did this daily and for decades, because she felt it was the right thing to do."
Unlike the network TV medical dramas we see today, there's an appealing colour palette and visual language Mann uses for Audrey's Children, which not only helps to embed the audience in the era of the film, but invokes the feeling for reality and sincerity in the movie.
"There are no primary colours in the movie, everything's sort of a deeply saturated, and there's a very judicious use of the colour red," Mann explained. "I really wanted to create an environment that felt viscerally, thoroughly authentic, and that the lighting felt that way, and the costuming felt that way."
"The idea was that you could invite the audience in, sweep them along and at the end of the movie they, almost without realizing, have been told a story about kids with cancer."
Having a keen eye as a director, Mann also used patterns as an effective motif throughout the film.
"In one of the conversations I had with [Dr. Evans], which apparently she hadn't shared up to that point, she told me about having been a child in isolation with tuberculosis," Mann said. "I wanted to incorporate the idea of, here's a person who can see patterns in things, and that ability to see patterns as a child, and that focus away from loneliness, pain as a child, seeing patterns kind of translates later as an adult to [being] able to see patterns in what she's researching as well."
As women, particularly when we watch movies and TV shows set in different decades, the portrayal of misogyny in society oftentimes feel insincere and ineffective. But Mann's approach to showing the sexism Dr. Evans faced as a successful doctor in a field largely occupied by men, in addition to elements in her personal life, like not being able to purchase a property without having a husband, was an integrated part of the story.
"I really wanted ... the historical sexism to be the wallpaper in the room, not the contents of the room," Mann said. "It's not necessarily something that you can battle or fight, it's not something that's necessarily a thing that you can defeat. It is usually just the context that you're working in."
"It's sometimes very quiet, ... but it's there nonetheless, and it affects people's choices and decisions, and the way they see each other. So the scene where she's in the conference room on her first day and she's the only woman in the room, that actually wasn't in the script. That was just a moment I was able to kind of just build on set, because I just felt like there's a lot of women, hopefully, that would be able to see that and identify and say, 'I've actually been in that situation. I know exactly what that feels like,' even if I wasn't able to name it or call it out."
It's similar thinking when stressing in the film that Dr. Evans' romantic relationship with Dr. D'Angio as an "intellectual love story."
"They needed to feel like intellectual equals," Mann said. "They need to feel like it was a man who could go toe-to-toe with her, without feeling like he was dominating her, and without feeling like he was being dominated by her, but yet be completely different in the way that they are approaching things."
"You can see them falling in love in a way that isn't physicalized. They love the way each other ... talks and thinks, and that's what draws them to each other."
With an interesting perspective as a director and writer, Mann is responsible for some particularly impactful TV episodes and movies, including episodes of Sneaky Pete and The Blacklist, and films Texas Killing Fields and Morning.
But fans of the famed TV show Friday Night Lights will know that Mann directed one of the most memorable episodes of the whole series, Season 4, Episode 10 titled "I Can't." The episode where Becky makes the decision to have an abortion. It's a topic Mann wanted to present in a way that was "multifaceted" and centred around the "human perspective."
"I felt really privileged to be able to do that episode. We shot it in five-and-a-half days, that's how short the shoot was," Mann shared. "I just have a lot of gratitude for being the one that was given that story to tell."
"I wanted very much to try to present the issue of abortion and choice as personally as possible. ... We look at the statistics and we look at the numbers, and in the end and the beginning is a story about one person trying to make the choice that they feel is aligned with their life. And that's really, really, really hard to do."
But both the Friday Night Lights episode and Audrey's Children, while more than a decade apart, exemplify Mann's commitment to trying to use her position as a writer and director to give people a voice, who may otherwise not have the opportunity.
"I take seriously the idea of trying to help in any way possible to be a voice for people who may not otherwise have a voice. I take seriously the responsibility of being a storyteller and being a filmmaker, and being a director," Mann said.
"There are a thousand places to put a camera in a room and where you decide to put the camera is informed by literally your point of view. Not only in terms of the point of view that you want to convey in the film itself, but your point of view as you're walking through the world. ... There's no such thing as an objective camera position, and everybody's going to choose to put it in a different place. So maybe it's possible to take opportunities with stories, to put the camera in a point of view that will show the subject matter's point of view in a way that people haven't seen before. And in that way, be of benefit and share stories that wouldn't otherwise be known."
Audrey's Children opens in theatres starting March 28.