My wife and I like to explore movies that ran beneath the radar. One called “Noble” caught our eye and it was well worth the watch, as it is a true story about a relatively unknown hero.
Per Wikipedia, “Noble is a 2014 film written and directed by Stephen Bradley about the true life story of Christina Noble, a children’s rights campaigner, charity worker and writer, who founded the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation in 1989. It stars Deirdre O’Kane, Sarah Greene, Brendan Coyle, Mark Huberman and Ruth Negga.
The film is set in Vietnam in 1989, fourteen years after the end of the war. Christina Noble flies into Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), a country ‘that she wouldn’t be able to show you on a map.’ With a few dollars, her own hard-won courage, she is about embark on a life calling. The film explores her tough upbringing in Dublin and her early adult life in the UK. It is the inspirational true story of a woman who believes that it only takes one person to make a difference.”
Per The Guardian article called “Christina Noble: the woman who transformed the lives of 700,000 children,” by Joanna Moorhead, here is a quick summary of Noble.
“We all have dreams, but Christina Noble had a dream that was to transform not just her own life, but that of the lives of 700,000 children (and counting). At the height of the Vietnam war, in the 1970s, Christina went to bed after watching the news and dreamed she could go there and make a difference.
At the time she was raising three children of her own in Birmingham, working all hours as a waitress and coping with the fallout from an abusive marriage. She wasn’t rich, she wasn’t highly educated, she knew next to nothing about Vietnam and what was happening there and she had no skills that might have singled her out as someone who could do something useful in a country thousands of miles away. When she called an aid agency to tell them about her dream and to offer her services, they listened politely and said they would call back. Unsurprisingly, they never did.
The aid agency people weren’t to know it, but there was one qualification Christina had for the work she was volunteering for. She had endured a childhood of appalling suffering and from that had sprung a passion to help other children. ‘It doesn’t matter whether you’re in a gutter in Dublin or Ho Chi Minh City, it’s still a gutter,’ she says when we meet to talk about a film that has been made about her life. ‘What I want to do is get children out of the gutter because it’s no childhood at all – every child deserves love and cuddles and kindness and warm food and a bed, and every child has the right not to be afraid.’”
In today’s time, where we look to superior athletes and celebrities as heroes, it is awe-inspiring to see a real hero. Noble’s heart is matched by her tenacity to serve these kids, often not taking no for an answer after it is offered up time and again. I encourage you to either read-up on her life, watch this movie or both. Her name is apt as she has a noble cause which she fights for.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/feb/13/my-700000-children
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Note to Readers: The movie flashes back and forth as it tells the story about Noble’s childhood and teen years. Noble’s mother died of what look like was tuberculosis. Her father was a violent alcoholic whose four children were taken away and put on orphanages. Noble was treated poorly by the nuns, and when raped walking back from a job, she got pregnant and her child was taken away by the nuns and put up for adoption without her permission (the movies “Philomena” and “Sunshine and Oranges” tell of this horrible practice). Her eventual husband went from nice guy to womanizer and abuser.
So, Noble put up with a lot that flavored her perspective and drove her to help these kids.