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LONDON: Oscar-winning actor Kate Winslet makes her directorial debut with \u201cGoodbye June\u201d, a holiday season-set drama about a family faced with loss coming together.<\/strong><\/p>\n Winslet, who also stars in the film, directs from a screenplay by her son Joe Anders. The story was partly inspired by their personal experience of losing Winslet\u2019s mother, Anders\u2019 grandmother, to cancer in 2017.<\/p>\n \u201cI just wanted to make a film that felt authentic and real,\u201d said Winslet, premiering the movie with Anders and the cast in London on Wednesday.<\/p>\n \u201cI also didn\u2019t want to make a story that was about someone who dies because it\u2019s really not. It\u2019s actually about the life that is given to the people who are left behind.\u201d<\/p>\n Winslet said she wanted to set the movie in Britain\u2019s National Health Service space because it is \u201cmassively undervalued\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd we need to give credit and honour the people who do that incredible work, especially our palliative care workers,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s entirely fictional,\u201d added Anders. \u201cI think it just emotionally came from that place of sending my grandmother off.\u201d<\/p>\n Anders, whose father is filmmaker Sam Mendes, wrote the script when he was 19, and showed it to Winslet for feedback.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t even know if I could write a screenplay. I just really wanted to give it my best shot. And the fact that it\u2019s been made into a movie is insane,\u201d Anders, now 21, said.<\/p>\n Winslet, who has three children, said she had thought about stepping behind the camera over the years but raising a family kept her busy.<\/p>\n \u201cThere just wouldn\u2019t have been that space in my life, I think, emotionally and just energetically. I couldn\u2019t possibly have added anything else into the juggle of it all. But this felt like the right moment, and I felt really ready to do it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n In the film, family matriarch June (Helen Mirren) is hospitalised shortly before Christmas. Her husband (Timothy Spall), son (Johnny Flynn) and three daughters, played by Winslet, Andrea Riseborough and Toni Collette, and their offspring rush to her bedside, bringing with them conflict and personal struggles, but also joy and care.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s such an honest look at the transition from life into the next. And it\u2019s about family, the mess and the beauty of the dysfunctional family system,\u201d said Collette.<\/p>\n \u201cGoodbye June\u201d is released in select UK cinemas on December 12 and starts streaming on Netflix on December 24.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n