A new Australian classic

Glimmers of hope have emerged from the uninspiring morass that is contemporary Australian cinema: first came Adam Elliot’s masterful Mary and Max.

Hot on its heels, equally brilliant but very different, is Samson & Delilah, the debut feature from Warwick Thornton.

Thornton’s film is a brutal, coruscatingly beautiful look at life for the two Aboriginal teenagers of the film’s title. Living in a remote community in Central Australia, theirs is a world plagued by violence and petrol sniffing. This is nothing, though, compared to the trauma they experience when they flee their community and live on the streets of Alice Springs.

While there’s a message of hope and redemption in the film, it still makes for a difficult viewing experience, something that Thornton has witnessed firsthand at preview screenings around the country.

Everybody’s been affected by it. It’s been an incredible journey with audiences -” opening this door to places people haven’t seen before, he told the Star.

A lot of people say -˜I feel so helpless’ [after watching the film], and a lot of people want to do something -” to make a change right now. The way I see it, it informs you and helps with your life and your journey.

It may not be an Aboriginal kid that you help, but it’s just those random acts of kindness you might think about after watching the film.

While urban, predominantly white audiences will find the film an eye-opening and at times upsetting experience, Thornton said his own central Australian community viewed it differently.

My mob live these lives. They laugh at the horrific things -” like the bashing of Delilah, people laughed at that, because they recognise it.

People in my community have told me, -˜that’s my film’ -” we’re talking 50-year-old men who were [petrol] sniffing when they were kids, and only survived by getting back to the country and getting back to who they are.

Thornton speaks passionately about wanting to expand the audience’s worldview -” to start re-humanising those we too often de-humanise, whether Aboriginal or otherwise.

It’s a funny one, because I think of it as -˜our kids’, not Aboriginal kids or white kids. If we rip down that bloody barrier between black and white, and look at it as our problem, we’d get a lot further, he said.

Amazingly for such a technically accomplished work, it was shot on a shoestring budget with a minuscule crew.

Also surprising is that the two outstanding lead actors, Marissa Gibson and Rowan McNamara, had never acted before. Thornton said he preferred it this way.

info: Samson & Delilah is now showing at selected cinemas.