Cast: Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Jeffrey Donovan, Colm Feore

Director: Clint Eastwood

For nearly 80 years, this story remained buried in the files of Los Angeles City Hall. The scriptwriter, J Michael Straczynski, discovered it just when the documents were about to be destroyed. Now, you can only wonder how.

Changeling is the true story of a woman, Christina Collins (Jolie), whose child goes missing, who is handed another that’s not hers, and who is almost arm-twisted by a shockingly corrupt Los Angeles police force into accepting the second boy as her own. When she resists, she is dubbed mad and thrown into a psychiatric ward. Doubts are put into her mind about whether she is imagining things — she is told that child could have “scientifically” grown shorter in the two months he remained missing - even as the police force gives up searching for her real son.

Christine fights back, with the help of a Reverend who has been waging his own battle against the police force. The truth is simply too big, and as it turns out, too grotesque, to remain hidden for long. As Christine says, she can’t give up as she knows that somewhere out there her son could be waiting for her to find him.

One can only imagine what Christine, a single woman raising a boy on her own, working at a telecom exchange, looking for a child on her bare resources — at a time without e-mail or 24X7 media — went through. The rest requires no stretch of the mind at all: that the police are under media pressure to crack the Collins case, that the media won’t leave a mother alone to grieve with her missing child; and that everyone would rather watch their own backs.

... contd.