Trailer: Naomi Watts finds aviary friendship and recovery in ‘Penguin Bloom’

Netflix has released the trailer for one of their latest pickups, Penguin Bloom, which debuted at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival.

In 2013, Samantha Bloom (two-time Academy Award nominee Naomi Watts), her husband Cameron (The Walking Dead’s Andrew Lincoln) and their three sons left their home in Australia for a holiday in Thailand. While enjoying a view, Sam fell off of a rooftop due to what was later determined to be a rotted railing…breaking her vertebrae in two places. Paralyzed from the chest down, Sam — a lifelong outdoorswoman, surfer, and traveler — was unrecognizable to herself, and spent long months in a depression that made her question who she could be in the world and in her own family.

A year later, her children bring home a wounded baby magpie they’ve found. Warily eyeing the black-and-white bird the kids affectionately named “Penguin,” Sam bonds with the household’s new member, beginning a process of emotional healing that surprises her husband and sons, her mother (two-time Academy Award nominee Jacki Weaver), and herself.

Penguin Bloom is based on a true story of renewal that occurred when a woman whose life seemed shattered found hope and purpose in her family’s love — and in a bird on its own journey of recovery.

Netflix will release the film on January 27, 2021. Here is the trailer.

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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